krow-backend

The backend for Krow — a Go API over PostgreSQL, with a Python Owliver service to follow. The Krow frontend lives in a separate repository (krow-demo) and is not vendored, copied or modified here.

Status: authenticated, authorized, multi-tenant. The API serves the endpoints in docs/api-contract.md against PostgreSQL, loaded with the frontend's own demo dataset. Every endpoint except GET /health and the two /api/v1/auth/* routes requires a session: sign in with a password, hold an HttpOnly cookie, and the server resolves it to a real user on every request. Roles are enforced — a deny-by-default policy table answers 403 before any query runs, and organization scope and talent ownership are SQL predicates, so a row you may not see answers 404. On top of that sits the agent and skill definition surface: Markdown with YAML frontmatter, parsed and stored, with full CRUD.

Not built: no Owliver, no RAG, no Redis, no object storage. The agent/skill runtime is an internal boundary with no executor behind it and no HTTP route into it.

docs/KROW_BACKEND_COMPLETE_SUMMARY.md is the long-form technical account — architecture, history, and a frank list of the current limitations.

Layout

krow-backend/
├── go-api/
│   ├── cmd/
│   │   ├── api/            the HTTP service entrypoint
│   │   ├── seed/           loads the demo dataset
│   │   └── setpassword/    the only way a password enters the database
│   ├── internal/
│   │   ├── config/         environment loading + validation
│   │   ├── db/             pgx pool and the database health check
│   │   ├── domain/         resource descriptors (generated) + the policy table
│   │   ├── repo/           pgx access layer — every statement built here
│   │   ├── service/        validation, org scoping, contract semantics
│   │   ├── auth/           argon2id passwords, sessions, the user store
│   │   ├── authctx/        the authenticated identity a request carries
│   │   ├── orgctx/         the organization a request runs as
│   │   ├── definition/     the agent/skill Markdown + YAML frontmatter parser
│   │   ├── runtime/        agent/skill load, validate, resolve, dispatch
│   │   ├── httpserver/     router, handlers, /health, graceful shutdown
│   │   ├── seeder/         fixture loading + the attendanceSeed.js port
│   │   └── testutil/       disposable migrated + seeded test database
│   └── go.mod
├── migrations/             SQL migrations — the source of truth for the schema
├── seed/fixtures/          seed.json, generated from the frontend repository
├── docs/
│   ├── api-contract.md     the frozen client contract
│   └── KROW_BACKEND_COMPLETE_SUMMARY.md   the long-form technical account
├── infrastructure/         deployment definitions (empty until later)
├── scripts/                verify_schema.sql, gen_resources.py, oracle.mjs
├── Makefile                developer, migration and seed tasks
└── .env.example

migrations/, seed/, scripts/ and infrastructure/ sit beside go-api/ rather than inside it because none of them is Go: the migrations are run by the golang-migrate CLI, the generator is Python, the parser oracle is Node, and a second service (Owliver, Python) is expected to consume the same schema.

Architecture

HTTP handler  →  service  →  repository  →  pgx  →  PostgreSQL

No ORM. Every statement is built in internal/repo from a *domain.Resource: column lists are explicit, every value is a bind parameter cast to its declared type, and no identifier ever comes from user input — a filter or sort name is resolved to a real column before any SQL is assembled.

The resource descriptors in internal/domain/resources_gen.go are generated from the live schema (make gen-resources), so column names, types, enum values and nullability cannot drift from the migrations. The hand-maintained part is the per-resource metadata — path, default sort, default limit, supported operations, required fields — which comes from docs/api-contract.md.

One shared query builder rather than fourteen repositories is deliberate: the contract's awkward semantics (NULLS LAST in both directions, the , id tiebreaker, per-endpoint limits, shallow PATCH, idempotent DELETE) are then implemented once and apply identically everywhere.

Requirements

Tool	Version used	Install
Go	1.27	brew install go
golang-migrate	4.19.1	brew install golang-migrate
PostgreSQL	18.6	brew install postgresql@18

Getting started

cp .env.example .env      # then fill in DATABASE_USER / DATABASE_PASSWORD
make db-create            # creates the database if it does not exist
make migrate-up           # applies every migration in migrations/
make seed                 # loads the frontend's demo dataset
make run                  # http://127.0.0.1:8080/health

The API

54 registered routes: 34 entity routes across 14 resources, 10 agent and skill definition routes, 4 /me routes, 2 /auth routes, 2 workflow routes, the Owliver suggestion route and GET /health. The entity routes and the suggestion route are specified in docs/api-contract.md (§2 and §2A); the definition and workflow routes are not yet in the contract and are documented in the source and its tests. Every entity route exists because a frontend call site exists — a table in the database is never a reason for an endpoint. DELETE /job-postings/{id} and POST /shift-records return 405 because nothing in the frontend deletes a posting or creates a shift record.

curl localhost:8080/api/v1/job-postings
curl "localhost:8080/api/v1/job-applications?job_posting_id=<id>&limit=50"
curl "localhost:8080/api/v1/job-applications?status=hired&status=interview"
curl localhost:8080/api/v1/me

Authentication is required. POST /api/v1/auth/login verifies a password with argon2id and issues a server-side session; the raw token goes out in an HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax cookie and only its SHA-256 is stored. Middleware resolves that cookie to a user on every request and puts the user's organization on the context — the same seam devOrgMiddleware used to occupy, so nothing in the service or repository layers changed.

Set a password before signing in: the seeded user's password_hash is NULL until go run ./cmd/setpassword -email demo@krow.app is run.

curl -c jar -X POST localhost:8080/api/v1/auth/login \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"email":"demo@krow.app","password":"…","remember_me":false}'
curl -b jar localhost:8080/api/v1/me
curl -b jar -X POST localhost:8080/api/v1/auth/logout

Authorization is enforced. users.role — admin, employer or talent, never the self-editable account_type — is the only authority. Entity routes are gated by the deny-by-default policy table in internal/domain/policy.go: a resource with no policy permits nothing to anyone, and Server.authorize answers 403 before any query runs. Row visibility is a SQL predicate rather than a filter — the organization scope always, plus an ownership clause for talent callers — so a row outside it is never fetched and answers 404, which does not distinguish "exists but not yours" from "does not exist".

The ten definition routes are the exception: they are not domain.Resource values, so the descriptor machinery does not reach them and their role checks are written inline in internal/service/definitions.go. Tenancy and ownership are enforced for them, in the repository predicates.

Seeding

make seed loads seed/fixtures/seed.json, which is generated by executing the frontend's src/api/seed.js through Vite — so ids, dates, numbers and enum values arrive exactly as the demo has them, with no transcription step.

Shift records are the exception: they are generated by a Go port of attendanceSeed.js rather than snapshotted, because their dates are anchored to now. dataResolver.inPeriod windows every collection on created_date, so a frozen snapshot would read as permanently empty a fortnight later.

Idempotency: explicit upsert inside one transaction. Every record's key is derived deterministically from its source id (uuid v5), so re-running targets the same rows and restores them to their seeded values. Nothing is deleted, so records created through the API survive a re-seed.

Tests

make test        # go test ./...

175 test functions. The database-backed ones build a disposable database — dropped, recreated, migrated and seeded per run, named krow_backend_autotest_<pid> so concurrent test packages cannot collide. They skip rather than fail when PostgreSQL is unreachable.

Seed assertions compare the database against the fixture field-by-field rather than against numbers typed into a test. The two ordering guarantees (NULLS LAST in both directions, and the , id tiebreaker) are covered by tests verified to fail when the guarantee is removed.

Parser conformance. The Go definition parser must agree with the frontend's JavaScript one. internal/definition/conformance_test.go asserts against internal/definition/testdata/oracle.json, which is not written by hand: it is captured by running the real frontend module graph through Vite, so the fixture records what the JS parser actually does rather than what anyone believes it does. Regenerating it needs a krow-demo checkout, and is not part of make test:

node scripts/oracle.mjs go-api/internal/definition/testdata/oracle.json

scripts/cases.mjs holds the adversarial corpus that file is captured over.

GET /health is public and says only whether traffic should be sent here: {"status": "ok"} with 200, {"status": "degraded"} with 200 when the database is up but unmigrated or left dirty, and {"status": "unavailable"} with 503 when it is unreachable. Nothing about the server, the database or the schema appears in the body — an unauthenticated caller gets the verdict, not the reasoning.

The check itself is unchanged: db.Check still gathers the PostgreSQL version, the database and schema names, the applied migration version, the table count and the connection error, and the handler logs all of it. Read it from the server log (debug when healthy, warn otherwise), or from psql.

Migrations

Migration files are the source of truth for the schema. Nothing in go-api/ issues DDL, no ORM generates it, and no table is ever created by hand — if the database and migrations/ disagree, migrations/ is right and the database is wrong.

make migrate-up                       # apply everything pending
make migrate-status                   # current version
make migrate-down                     # roll back exactly one step
make migrate-new NAME=add_sessions    # scaffold the next pair
make verify-schema                    # print tables, enums, FKs, indexes

Ordering. -seq numbering: 000001, 000002, … golang-migrate applies them in ascending order and records the highest applied version in schema_migrations. Two developers who both branch off 000001 and both write 000002 get a collision at merge — rename the later one rather than resolving it in the database.

Never edit an applied migration. Once a migration has run anywhere other than your own machine, it is immutable. Change it and every database that already applied it silently diverges from every one that has not. Write 000002 instead.

Guards against destructive change:

• There is no make migrate-drop. golang-migrate's drop command deletes every table in the database; it is deliberately not one keystroke from down.
• make migrate-down refuses to run unless APP_ENV=development.
• Down migrations name every object they drop. No DROP SCHEMA, no DROP DATABASE, no CASCADE on a schema.
• config.validate() rejects DATABASE_SCHEMA=pg_catalog, pg_toast, information_schema or anything starting with pg_, so the application can never be pointed at a system schema.
• DATABASE_SSLMODE=disable is rejected when APP_ENV=production.

Dirty state. If a migration fails partway, golang-migrate marks the version dirty and refuses to continue. Fix the SQL, restore from backup if the failure left data behind, then make migrate-force VERSION=<last-good> and re-run. /health answers "degraded" while the version is dirty, and the handler logs migration_dirty alongside the applied version, so the detail is in the server log rather than in the public response.

Staging and production. The same files, run by CI against the target database as a discrete deploy step before the new binary rolls out — which means every migration must be backwards-compatible with the currently-running version. Expand, migrate, contract: add a nullable column, backfill, switch reads, drop the old column in a later release. Never in one migration.

Schema

migrations/000001_initial_schema.up.sql creates 17 tables in public. Fifteen correspond to entities the frontend actually reads or writes through src/api/base44Client.js; organizations and user_preferences are the two additions, and both are documented in the migration itself.

Conventions:

• uuid primary keys, with a nullable unique legacy_id text so the existing seeded record ids survive a data migration.
• timestamptz throughout.
• created_date / updated_date keep their frontend names deliberately. The frontend windows every collection on created_date and its default sort string is -created_date; renaming these to created_at would mean touching the resolver, the store's sort parser and every hook.
• Native enums for closed vocabularies, text + CHECK where the set is still moving.
• Email columns are citext and stay populated even where a uuid FK also exists — the frontend joins workers by email today, and those joins must keep working.