They were hard-wrapped at 80 characters, broke mid-parenthesis, and spent lines
restating what the code below them does.

Rewrapped at natural boundaries instead, with the narration dropped and only the
reasons, gotchas and surprises kept. Section dividers stay - they delineate long
plays rather than narrate them.

Comments only; no scenario behaviour changes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SEH3vxYSQ5SV4N5z61eyGT

baibot is the first bot rather than a bridge, and the shape
differs from the appservices: it is a plain Matrix client that logs in with a
password, sets up its profile and then syncs. It publishes no port, so nothing
can be probed over HTTP; what it says about itself in the journal is the only
window into whether the role's configuration reached the process.

What the scenario proves:

- The unit is active with no automatic restarts, AND baibot got past startup
  into its sync loop. The second half is what carries the scenario. baibot never
  exits when startup goes wrong - it retries the failing step forever with a
  growing delay - so the unit sits there `active` with `NRestarts` at 0 while
  the bot is permanently half-started. Pointing `user.avatar` at a file that is
  not there reproduces exactly that: the unit assertion still passes, the sync
  assertion does not.
- The display name the bot announces it wants is the role's `user.name`, which
  is neither the role's default nor what the stub reports the account already
  has.
- The rendered `logging` string took effect per target: baibot's own records
  appear at DEBUG (the role ships `info`) while everything underneath stays at
  the `warn` catch-all. The second half is the control, and raising the
  catch-all turns 2 DEBUG records into 161.
- The rendered config carries the scenario's homeserver, identity, command
  prefix, admin patterns and user patterns, and uses password authentication
  exclusively, with the access-token keys rendered as nulls.
- The statically-defined agent survived the provider templating - the
  per-provider template rendered to YAML, parsed, merged and nested into the
  list - key by key.
- The container runs as the uid/gid the playbook supplies (1234, not the 1000
  the base image already has), on the image version defaults/main.yml pins, and
  could write its session into the data path.

No AI provider is contacted and none is needed. baibot calls a provider only
when a message asks an agent to do something, so a static agent with a
placeholder key and a base URL that resolves nowhere still has to survive the
bot's startup parsing - which is the part worth testing.

The shared stub grew what a syncing Matrix client needs and an appservice did
not: /sync (with a `next_batch`, and holding the call open for the timeout the
client asked for, or the bot spins the stub in a hot loop), the media config
and upload endpoints a bot setting its own avatar insists on, /keys/upload with
its key counts, and filter creation. Without the media config in particular,
baibot never gets past profile setup.

The shared stub task gained a STUB_VERBOSE knob. The stub already advertised
the environment variable but there was no way to set it from a scenario, and
for a component with no port of its own its request log is the only place to
see what the component is actually asking for.

Note: molecule-shared/homeserver-stub.py also carries a loosened /login match
from another scenario being written in this same tree at the same time; it was
already in the working copy and is not mine.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SEH3vxYSQ5SV4N5z61eyGT

The second scenario, chosen to be a bridge rather than another HTTP
component: bridges are roughly 40 of the 70 roles here, and validating the
shape on role two is cheaper than discovering it on role forty. It found
two things the first role could not.

Bridges read a whole family of variables from outside themselves -
matrix_bridges_relay_enabled, _encryption_enabled, _encryption_default,
_msc4190_enabled, _self_sign_enabled, plus matrix_admin - all defined in
matrix-base. Since every bridge reads them, they belong in shared context
rather than in each bridge's scenario: molecule-shared/playbook-context.yml
now carries them along with the identity and path variables the first
scenario had inline. Note it is loaded through vars_files, which outranks
inventory group_vars, so it is authoritative; a scenario that wants to prove
one of these reaches the rendered configuration should say so explicitly.

Appservices call /whoami while starting and refuse to run if the id returned
is not the bot user they were configured as - mautrix-whatsapp exits 17 with
"Unexpected user ID in whoami call". The shared stub now takes the id it
should claim to be. Expect every bridge and bot to need this.

What the scenario proves: the bridge starts and stays up, opens its
appservice port, its rendered config and appservice registration carry the
scenario's tokens and bot user, it created its sqlite database under the
role's data path as the role's uid, and it runs the version the role pins.
It does not bridge anything and never will.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

Components here contact a homeserver while starting up and exit if it is
unreachable, so nearly every scenario will need one. Standing up a real
Synapse per role would dominate the run and drag in Postgres, and these
scenarios are not testing Synapse.

The stub answers the handful of endpoints components touch during startup
with the blandest plausible response, and is deliberately permissive: an
unrecognised path returns {} rather than 404, because the goal is to get the
component past its startup checks. It is not an authentication check or a
room state machine, and a scenario should not assert *about* it - if one
starts needing it to behave like a real homeserver, that scenario has
outgrown what these tests are for.

matrix-alertmanager-receiver now includes it instead of carrying its own
inline copy. Verified green afterwards.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

Three things that would not have scaled to 70 roles:

- The Python and Ansible dependency pins were about to be copied into every
  role. They now live once in molecule-shared/, which scenarios reference
  relatively, so they cannot drift apart.
- The helper container images used for probing were hardcoded inline. They
  are pinned once in molecule-shared/vars.yml, carry `# renovate:`
  annotations, and a custom manager in .github/renovate.json keeps them
  current - verified with a local Renovate dry run, which offers
  curl 8.11.1 -> 8.21.0 and python 3.13 -> 3.14-alpine. Seventy invisible
  hardcodes is the blindness class we have been removing elsewhere.
- Running a scenario meant knowing the venv and cd incantation. `just
  molecule <role>` does it, and with no argument lists the roles that have
  a scenario.

Molecule is deliberately not wired into prek: a run takes minutes, pulls
images and needs Docker, which is fine on request and not fine per commit.

docs/molecule-testing.md covers how to run and write these, including the
four things a role here needs that a standalone role does not. AGENTS.md
points at it rather than carrying the detail.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

Not for merging as-is. One role's scenario plus the workflow that would
make per-role testing affordable here, so we can see how it behaves before
deciding whether to do the other 69.

Unlike the MASH repositories, one repository holds every role, so running
everything on every push is not an option. The workflow's first job works
out which roles a push touched and builds the matrix from that; a change to
docs, or to a role with no scenario yet, runs nothing.

Three things this role needed that a MASH role does not:

- The variables matrix-base would supply (matrix_base_data_path,
  matrix_domain, matrix_user_name, matrix_group_name and the uid/gid) have
  to be provided by the scenario, and the user and group have to exist
  before the role's file tasks run.
- The service contacts the homeserver while starting up - it fetches
  /_matrix/client/v3/joined_rooms to resolve its room mapping and exits 1
  if that fails - so prepare.yml stands up a stub homeserver. Most roles
  here are bridges and bots, so this is likely the rule rather than the
  exception.
- verify.yml runs as its own play, where role defaults are out of scope, so
  the paths it reads are pinned in molecule.yml. The version is deliberately
  NOT pinned: it is read from defaults/main.yml so the assertion compares
  the running image against what the role ships.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>