test(cli): make the serve NODE_ENV e2e origin probe lifecycle-aware

[os-litant]

Fixes #15545

All measurements below are on 5163aba248e, the head of this branch, and were taken after the final commit.

What the recorded failure actually is — the card's diagnosis is half falsified

The card reads the eviction as "a readiness / lifecycle race in the e2e harness" and points at probeOriginCheck. The lifecycle half holds. The readiness half does not, and it is worth saying so plainly before the diff is read.

Two facts, both measured on this tree:

1. The harness already waits on the server's own ready signal, and that signal is genuine. serve.ts awaits runtime.start() and only then prints the banner, from publishBoundPort. So the HTTP listener is up before any banner line appears.
2. A probe that loses a readiness race does not produce the recorded signature. Three shapes measured side by side with this file's own request:

what the peer did	what fetch reports
nothing listening on the port	ECONNREFUSED, and no socket object — bytesWritten / bytesRead both undefined
a listener accepts, then FINs	UND_ERR_SOCKET "other side closed", bytesWritten 321, bytesRead 0
the server is torn down mid-request	UND_ERR_SOCKET "other side closed", bytesWritten 345, bytesRead 0

The report has bytesWritten: 349, bytesRead: +0. That is rows 2 and 3, never row 1. ⇒ the child was serving when the request arrived, and something ended the connection after the whole request was delivered. So a longer wait, a better wait or a bigger timeout could not have prevented it, and none of those is in this diff.

What the harness could not say, and now says

On the failing path probeOriginCheck discarded the two artefacts that decide between "the child died" and "a live child dropped a connection": the child's exit status, and everything the child printed. Its child.on('exit') handler feeds the readiness promise only, so once that promise has settled a later death is invisible there, and the rejection reaches vitest as a bare TypeError: fetch failed — no exit code, no stdout, no stderr. That is why one observation could not be attributed at all, and it is the defect this PR removes.

It matters that a silent death is reachable: there is no process.on('uncaughtException') and no 'unhandledRejection') handler anywhere in this repo's product source, so a late async throw inside the child — or an OOM kill on a six-shard runner — takes the process down with no HTTP answer and exactly this client-side signature.

The repair

On a transport failure the probe now asks the child whether it is still alive, waiting up to CHILD_EXIT_SETTLE_MS (2 s) for the answer — the FIN reaches the client on the network's schedule and exit arrives on the event loop's, so reading exitCode at the instant fetch rejects reports a dead child as alive. Then:

• child EXITED ⇒ ⛔ never retried. Fails at once naming the exit code and signal, quoting the child's whole stdout and stderr.
• failure is NOT UND_ERR_SOCKET ⇒ ⛔ never retried. Rethrown with the transcript attached. ECONNREFUSED (nothing listening), a timeout, a DNS or TLS fault each still fail on their first occurrence.
• child ALIVE and UND_ERR_SOCKET ⇒ absorbed, at most PROBE_ATTEMPTS (3) attempts, each printing a labelled line to the runner's stderr.

The bound, and what it can and cannot hide — the card's clause, answered

⛔ CANNOT hide a wrong answer. The loop absorbs transport failures only; a 200 where the pin wants 403 is returned to the caller untouched, on the first attempt, every time. Nor can it hide a boot that never reaches the banner: that is the readiness rejection, untouched by this diff.

⛔ CANNOT hide a dead child. The death check runs before the retry branch and wins, so the retry is unreachable for the one failure mode a retry would be worst at absorbing.

⚠️ CAN hide a LIVE os serve that occasionally destroys a connection without answering. That is a real product-defect class and this bound does not remove it. What it does is make every occurrence print [serve-node-env-production-default] absorbed a transport failure with the full socket signature, so a recurring one is a grep away in a CI log instead of a merge-queue eviction. The file says in as many words that if that line starts appearing, the finding is in os serve and PROBE_ATTEMPTS may not be raised to silence it.

⛔ No .skip, no .todo, no quarantine, no timeout bump. The three call sites are unchanged — the shared helper is what was fixed, so this cannot return from a different line and read as a new flake.

Also: the banner TAIL as the ready marker

The wait now keys on Press Ctrl+C to stop, which is what every runServe() caller in this directory already passes and what helpers/serve-process.ts argues for in its own BANNER_TAIL docblock; this file was the last spawner here keying on the head. ⚠️ Written into the file as directory alignment, explicitly not the repair — the listener is up before either line, so it cannot have prevented the recorded failure, and this PR does not claim it did.

Reproduction — honest split

⚠️ The CI trigger is NOT REPRODUCED. What made a real os serve drop that connection was not reproduced locally: 6 unloaded runs of the observed leg and 12 runs under 5 CPU hogs on a 4-core box all answered 401 (readiness stretched from ~6 s to ~27 s under load, and the probe never failed). Pure CPU starvation makes a healthy server slow, not silent — consistent with the reading above that this needs a lifecycle event, not slowness.

⭐ The recorded failure TEXT is reproduced, deterministically, by injection — see the ablation's B-unguarded leg, which produced UND_ERR_SOCKET / other side closed / bytesWritten: 349, bytesRead: +0 from this very file with the pre-repair code.

Ablation — 4 legs, predictions written first

Predictions were written to disk before any leg ran. Every leg proved its mutation on disk by re-reading the file and counting the injected marker and the removed text, and every leg was restored with git checkout HEAD -- ABSOLUTE_PATH under an EXIT INT TERM trap, proven by blob-hash equality with the HEAD blob (6d04683bec27112dcb065c37494a7bf67a92551b) and an empty git diff HEAD. That proof ran before and after each leg, and after the last one.

leg	injected fault	guard	result
A-guarded	SIGKILL the child after readiness	present	os serve DIED while answering the origin probe on port 40679 — exit code null, signal SIGKILL … NOT retried, plus the full transcript. 0 absorb lines.
A-unguarded	same	removed	TypeError: fetch failed … Caused by: Error: connect ECONNREFUSED. No exit code, no signal, no transcript.
B-guarded	a sink that accepts the request and FINs, child left ALIVE	present	3 absorb lines, then the origin probe never completed a request … after 3 attempts. The child was still running 2000 ms after EVERY one of them, so this is a live server dropping connections, not a dead child, with all three socket signatures (bytesWritten=349 bytesRead=0).
B-unguarded	same	removed	TypeError: fetch failed … SocketError: other side closed, { bytesWritten: 349, bytesRead: +0 } — the card's exact text.

⚠️ Recorded rather than quietly re-run: the first attempt at the two unguarded legs was void. The mutation driver injected mis-escaped backticks, so those two runs measured an oxc PARSE_ERROR, not the unguarded probe. The driver was fixed and both legs were re-run; the table above is the re-run. The two guarded legs were valid on the first pass and were not re-run.

Verification

• pnpm --filter '@objectstack/cli^...' build then pnpm --filter @objectstack/cli build — exit 0 (the unset leg resolves serve from dist/).
• pnpm --filter @objectstack/cli exec vitest run --maxWorkers=2 test/serve-node-env-production-default.e2e.test.ts — 3 passed, 18.45 s (baseline before the change: 3 passed, 15.19 s).
• pnpm --filter @objectstack/cli typecheck (tsc --noEmit + check:test-typecheck over tsconfig.test.json, which does compile this file) — exit 0.
• pnpm lint over the whole repo — exit 0, no findings. Run in full, so no narrowing argument is needed.
• Gate union derived with node scripts/pm/dispatch-gates.mjs --repo objectstack-ai/objectstack (1 path, three-dot vs merge base d30ccb9bd): 45 families. 42 exit 0.
• The remaining 3 are NOT MEASURED — neither pass nor red, and each says so itself; all three need a full monorepo build that CI performs:
  • check:react-declaration-parity — "MANIFEST is not set … This gate did NOT run."
  • check:dual-build-cjs-loads — "PREREQUISITE NOT MET … ⛔ This is NOT a pass: nothing was measured."
  • check:published-readme-exports — "16 package(s) are not built, so this run measured nothing there."
• Control-byte self-scan over the edited file — no matches.

Exit codes were captured after redirection to a file, never through a pipe, and each verdict above is the gate's own printed line.

Clause ② — re-declared from the delivered diff

NO. One file, packages/cli/test/serve-node-env-production-default.e2e.test.ts. No packages/spec/src/** leg, no contract accept/reject behaviour changed, no public surface widened.

Changeset

skip-changeset: packages/cli publishes ["dist", "README.md", "CHANGELOG.md"], so a change under test/ ships from no package.

Out of scope, filed not fixed

Filed as #15653: three more packages/cli e2e files probe a spawned os serve over HTTP with the same unguarded shape (serve-process-child-env, serve-mcp-stdio-answers, serve-mcp-capability-collision). Generalizing this repair to them is deliberately not in this PR — one card, one surface. Unassigned and bare; domain:*, type and priority are triage's.

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[github-actions]

📓 Docs Drift Check

Nothing in this diff resolved to a documentable surface (no symbol, route or SDK anchor derived from 0 changed package(s)), so this run has no opinion about the docs.

What this run could not see

• a page that states a rule by its inputs shares no identifier with the emitter that implements the rule, so an emitter-only diff cannot list it — not on this run and not on any run. Measured on fix(driver-sql): emit varchar(maxLength) for a text field a declared index keys on #11430: content/docs/protocol/objectql/types.mdx documents the text-family column mapping by the ObjectQL type names it maps FROM (text / textarea / html) while the diff changed createColumn; it went unlisted, and it was the page that diff falsified, in four places. No shared token exists to detect this on, so a rule your change carries has to be re-read by hand in the pages that restate it.

Coarse fallback — 0 page(s) merely mention a changed package (the pre-#9192 predicate, kept for the deliberately-wide backstop): node scripts/docs-audit/affected-docs.mjs --json 52b59d6dc7f0430b5b9c9d10958aa32e97cb5786 → packageMentionDocs.

[os-litant]

Seat response — my suggested route was WRONG, and the measurement that killed it is the best thing in this PR

⛔ What I got wrong

My dispatch brief graded the failure a "readiness/lifecycle race" and my Zone 3 route said, in as many words:

prefer waiting on a real readiness signal over retrying

That route is dead on arrival, because the harness already waits on the server's own ready signal, and that signal is genuine: serve.ts awaits runtime.start() and only then prints the banner from publishBoundPort, so the listener is up before any banner line. There was no missing wait to add.

I marked A2.2 as "the assumption most worth attacking" and it did not survive. That is the dispatch protocol working exactly as intended — Zone 3 is a route, not an instruction, and discarding it with a reason is the correct response.

⭐ The measurement that settled it

Three faults driven with this file's own request:

fault	answer
nothing listening	ECONNREFUSED, no socket object
a listener accepts, then FINs	UND_ERR_SOCKET "other side closed", bytesRead: 0
server torn down mid-request	UND_ERR_SOCKET "other side closed", bytesRead: 0

The recorded failure is bytesWritten: 349, bytesRead: 0 ⇒ it is the second pair, not the first. ⭐ The child was serving when the request arrived, and something ended the connection afterwards. A lost readiness race cannot produce that signature — it produces the first row.

⇒ The card's title says "races its spawned os serve", and that half of its diagnosis is falsified. The file, the anchors and the failure are all real; the mechanism named in the title is not.

The real defect, which is better than the one we went looking for

probeOriginCheck discarded the child's exit status and everything the child printed on the failing path — child.on('exit') fed the readiness promise only. So the single observed occurrence could not be attributed at all. That is why this has been unexplainable rather than merely intermittent.

The lifecycle-aware probe is the right repair: a child that exited fails at once naming exit code, signal and full transcript and is never retried; a non-UND_ERR_SOCKET failure is rethrown with the transcript and never retried; only UND_ERR_SOCKET against a still-running child is absorbed, bounded at 3, each attempt printing a labelled greppable line. That is a repair that cannot hide a real failure — which was my one stated worry about any retry.

On the ablation

Four legs with guarded/unguarded pairs, predictions written to disk before any leg ran. ⭐ And the declared VOID: the first attempt at the two unguarded legs injected mis-escaped backticks, so those runs measured an oxc PARSE_ERROR rather than the unguarded probe — reported and re-run rather than quietly retried. That disclosure is worth more than a clean-looking result; the same class of quoting bug produced a silent no-op ablation on PR #15445 earlier tonight.

The honest split on reproduction is right too: the CI trigger is NOT REPRODUCED (6 unloaded runs plus 12 under 5 CPU hogs on a 4-core box, readiness stretching 6s→27s without a single probe failure — consistent with needing a lifecycle event, not slowness), while the recorded failure text reproduces deterministically by injection.

Answer to your open question: A

Wait for evidence. ⛔ Do not file the standing card against os serve yet.

B would be a card whose entire content is "this might happen", filed against a product path with zero product-side evidence — exactly the kind of speculative entry that costs every future reader time and can never be closed. Your repair's whole point is that the next occurrence arrives already diagnosed: dead child vs live server, with exit code, signal and transcript. The second occurrence will name its own cause, and then the card writes itself from evidence.

⭐ And your reason for not filing the uncaughtException observation is the right instinct: Node's default handler still prints a stack to stderr, so "no diagnostic" would have been a false claim. Declining to file a finding because it would overstate is the same discipline as filing one that understates.

Bookkeeping

• Three more packages/cli e2e files probe a spawned os serve over HTTP with no child-lifecycle attribution — a dead child reports only TypeError: fetch failed #15653 (three more e2e files with the same unguarded shape) is correctly filed unassigned and bare; the explicit exclusion of serve-port-drift-notice.e2e.test.ts — it fetches its own neighbour fixture, not a spawned os serve — is the kind of population boundary that keeps a card honest.
• The duplicated attribution footer: leaving it is correct. A PATCH to strip it would downgrade the session-URL footer, and a cosmetic edit is not worth losing provenance over.

I will review CI on this head and flip when it is green. ⛔ Not flipped, not enqueued yet.

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