Deployed to a real VPS for the first time. The stack came up, the patched
wizard served, the plugins activated and the 40-check auth suite passed over
the public internet — and then every single export failed:
cURL error 28: Failed to connect to <public ip> port 8081 after 10001 ms
Not a bug in the export. A container cannot reach the host's own published
port on most Docker hosts; there is simply no route back in. The exporter
renders each page by asking the site for it over HTTP, so the one thing it
depends on is the one thing a container cannot do. This would have hit every
user of the documented install path on their first publish, and the error
says nothing about the cause.
SIRIUS_PRESS_LOOPBACK_URL gives the exporter a second address — in the
bundled stack, the nginx service on the compose network — while the request
still carries the site's real Host header. That matters twice: WordPress
renders exactly the page a visitor gets rather than redirecting to a
canonical URL the container cannot follow, and the internal hostname never
appears in the exported HTML. Verified on the VPS: the page builds, the
content is right, no absolute self-links, no `//web/` leaking out.
Also documents the question underneath it — what WP_HOME should be when the
site's public address is a BCNR name. Not the name: whatever the server is
actually reachable at. The exported links are document-relative, so they work
under the name regardless.
The subtree is in place, so everything that used to fetch and patch core at
build time now just copies it.
tools/build.sh copies wordpress/ — no download, no checksum step,
because there is nothing to fetch and nothing to
trust that is not already in the repository
docker/Dockerfile COPY wordpress/ instead of curl + sha256 + patch;
the build args and the `patch` package are gone
docker-compose.yml no WP_VERSION / WP_URL / WP_SHA256 to keep in step
tools/update-wordpress.sh is rewritten around what the subtree makes
possible. It imports the pristine release onto sirius-press/wordpress-upstream
and then `git subtree merge`s that branch, which three-way merges upstream
against the fork's own commit. A patch either applies with fuzz and hopes or
fails and leaves you re-deriving the change by hand; a merge conflict is
resolved once, in the file, and the next release merges against the
resolution.
patches/ survives as documentation rather than mechanism, and is now
generated: tools/refresh-patches.sh diffs the subtree against the pristine
import and rewrites the directory, with --check for CI. It answers the
question anyone auditing a fork asks first — what exactly did you change
inside WordPress? — in a minute, which `git log wordpress/` cannot, because
that log is mostly upstream imports. Generated documentation stays true; a
hand-maintained record of a core diff drifts, and a stale one is worse than
none because people trust it.
One test change worth noting: the syntax sweep no longer walks all of
wordpress/. It lints the fork's own PHP plus every core file patches/ says
the fork touches, which keeps the suite at seven seconds instead of a minute
while still covering the only core file that can break.
WordPress makes two assumptions this project cannot accept: that identity
comes from an email address, and that a site lives at one server. Both are
things somebody else can take away — a mailbox is rented from a provider who
can close it or be compelled to open it, and a server is one seizure from
being gone.
Sirius Press replaces the first and hedges the second.
Signing in means signing a challenge with the key that controls a CashAddress.
The address is recovered from the signature, so nothing is typed but the
signature itself, and the result is an ordinary WordPress session cookie —
roles, capabilities, nonces and the REST API never learn the login was
different. Three ways to produce one: a wallet the browser already exposes, a
phrase used once in the page and wiped, or a signature pasted in from any
BIP-137 wallet, which needs no JavaScript and lets the key stay on a machine
that never touches the web.
There is no password reset, and the recovery page says so plainly rather than
offering a form that cannot work. A reset mechanism is by construction a way
to take an account from its owner, and it is always easier to attack than the
cryptography it bypasses.
Publishing a post also exports it as static HTML to the name's storage on Sia,
signed by the key that owns the name, so the site keeps answering when the
server does not.
Email as a feature is untouched. wp_mail() still works, SMTP still sends, and
contact forms still deliver to addresses real people typed. Only mail to the
site's own unroutable placeholder addresses is diverted to an in-app inbox.
The objection was to email as identity, not to email.
Core is pinned and patched rather than vendored. WordPress 7.1.1 is 149 MB and
5,008 files; the fork's entire core diff is 75 lines in wp-admin/install.php.
Carrying the former to express the latter would bury the patch where nobody
reviews it and make every clone of the monorepo pay for it. Upstream releases
still merge through tools/update-wordpress.sh, which reapplies the series and
says exactly which hunk needs a human.
The cryptography is implemented twice — PHP on the server, JavaScript in the
page — because the server must verify and the browser must sign. Both are
pinned against libauth, the library the Sirius portal wallet and the BNS
gateway already use, so a disagreement of one byte fails the test suite rather
than presenting as a rejected login at three in the morning.
132 checks, no framework, about a second.
