Use received frames for peer liveness and reject new requests after terminal relay failures. Keep authoritative usage snapshots separate from refresh errors, bound request lifetime, and guard concurrent refreshes and runtime switches.
Add regression coverage for relay liveness, terminal rejections, quota failures, cancellation and request deadlines. Validated with 51 focused tests, workspace type-check and lint, web build and mobile assets.
Negotiate downstream delivery credit and schedule response streams fairly before encryption. Bound queued output, preserve deltas and WebSocket close ordering, and retain legacy peer compatibility.
Validated with 81 relay tests, workspace type-check and lint, web build and mobile assets, and slow-link tests through the production relay. Confirmed on LTE by the maintainer.
Two mitigations for local multi-instance contention over the shared relay
identity:
- A standby instance now waits a 2-minute grace period after the host claim
frees before taking over, so a cleanly restarting host (app update or
relaunch) — which reclaims at boot with no wait — always wins the restart
window instead of stranding paired devices on another process.
- Dev instances never host the relay passively: dev scripts set
OPENCHAMBER_RELAY_HOST=off and the Electron dev shell is detected via
OPENCHAMBER_ELECTRON_DEV. Explicit enable/pairing on such an instance still
force-claims; OPENCHAMBER_RELAY_HOST=on overrides.
When the relay drops mid-request, the prompt_async body frames can be
lost. The tunnel host forwarded the request to loopback as an
empty/truncated chunked body, which the server rejects with a bare 400
(empty response body) — the mobile app's 'Failed to send message (400)'.
Host now buffers request bodies (<512KB) and forwards the complete body
only once StreamEnd arrives; larger bodies still stream live. A new
hasBody flag on the request head lets the host detect a body that
delivered zero frames and abort it as an ambiguous transport failure
(which the client already retries) instead of forwarding an empty body.
A 15s body-delivery deadline converts stalled tunnels into clean aborts.
Replace the legacy terminal flow with a shared authenticated WebSocket
runtime used across web, desktop, relay, and mobile surfaces.
- introduce the v3 terminal protocol with scoped attachments, snapshots,
ordered output, bounded replay history, reconnects, and explicit lifecycle
- harden PTY creation, restart, resize, close, force-kill, idle cleanup,
shell selection, login mode, environment sanitization, and appearance sync
- add runtime-aware terminal APIs with relay authentication and Electron parity
- add a fullscreen mobile terminal workspace with touch scrolling,
long-press selection, safe-area controls, quick keys, and Ctrl/Alt input
- add terminal selection attachments, preview detection, project actions,
shell settings, and localized UI
- harden Ghostty rendering, resize recovery, Unicode handling, block
characters, line height, and stale-row behavior
- remove the obsolete terminal SSE path and update reverse-proxy guidance
- expand terminal runtime, transport, input, selection, and store coverage
- avoid duplicate web builds when preparing mobile assets in root CI builds
All local instances share the data dir and therefore the relay identity
(serverId), so concurrent relay hosts evicted each other at the relay worker
(4001: Control replaced) and paired devices landed on whichever local process
won last — often a stale dev server, surfacing as 'Unable to reach server'
and devices stuck on relay with 503s on newer endpoints.
- relay/host-lock.js: per-machine claim file (relay-host.lock, {pid}); stale
claims from dead pids are ignored; unwritable data dir falls back to
pre-lock behavior
- relay/service.js: start only when the claim is free or ours, otherwise
'standby' with the holder pid in lastError; 30s watcher takes over when the
claimant dies and stands down when another process claims; pairing-link
creation and explicit /relay/enable force-claim (user intent wins)
- mobileConnections.ts: log candidate-refresh skip reasons and the refresh
result instead of failing silently
Candidates refresh (server + mobile + desktop clients):
- GET /api/client-auth/connection/candidates returns the server's current
LAN URLs, relay candidate, and serverId for already-paired devices
- /health and /api/version expose serverId so clients can verify a learned
address belongs to the expected server before sending their bearer token
- mobile: refresh saved candidates over the live transport after every
connect/wake, hot-switch relay->LAN when a fresh address is reachable;
serverId gate on direct probes; token no longer sent to /health
- desktop: refresh stored host apiUrl after a relay connect and hot-switch
back to direct; electron probe verifies serverId before authenticated fetch
Fixes found while debugging a dead pairing:
- settings: strict reader that throws on corrupt/unreadable file instead of
returning {}; relay signing/encryption key generation is now gated on it,
so a swallowed read failure can no longer mint a new server identity and
orphan every paired device (loud log when a keypair IS generated)
- SessionAuthGate: bounded auto-retry for transient session-check failures
(initial request racing the relay tunnel's first WS attempt, startup 5xx)
Reworks how devices connect to an OpenChamber server, end to end.
Pairing v2:
- One-time pairing links/QR codes (openchamber://connect?v=2) carrying a set of transport candidates (LAN/tunnel/relay) and a single-use secret redeemed server-side; no tokens embedded in links
- Add-a-device dialog written for first-time users: intent-based transport choice (Anywhere / Home network only / This computer only) with plain-language descriptions, transparent fallback checkboxes, server-authoritative LAN detection, high-res QR dialog
- Private relay folded into pairing as a transport candidate with a demand-driven lifecycle (enables when a relay device is paired, disables when none remain)
Multi-transport devices:
- A saved device holds all its transports and one token; mobile re-probes on connect, resume, and network change and hot-switches LAN<->relay seamlessly (no re-pairing, no remount, session preserved)
- Desktop can import relay pairing links, switch to relay hosts through the E2EE tunnel, and restore a relay default host after relaunch
Device management:
- Device list (web + desktop) shows live per-device connectivity with the active transport (Connected - Local network / Relay) and platform badges (iOS/Android/macOS/Windows/Linux)
- One physical device = one record: stable per-install dedupe keys across pairing and password re-login; typed pairing label names the device, paired devices name the connection by the issuing server hostname
- Trusted desktop-local client manages all devices (list, revoke, clear revoked); relay host reaps dead client sockets after 3 missed keepalives
Android:
- LAN transport unblocked (cleartext + mixed content, mirroring iOS ATS exceptions); resume re-probe retries through network flux and silently auto-reconnects from a disconnected state
Adds OpenChamber Relay — an opt-in way to reach an instance from a phone,
browser, or another desktop from anywhere, with no open inbound ports, no
tunnel, and no shared LAN. The instance dials outbound to a relay; all app
traffic (HTTP, the event stream, terminal, dictation) is multiplexed and
encrypted through a single connection per client, so the relay only ever
forwards opaque ciphertext.
Transport
- End-to-end-encrypted channel over WebCrypto (ECDH P-256 -> HKDF ->
AES-256-GCM) with a capability-negotiated handshake and a small
HTTP/SSE/WebSocket multiplexing protocol. A byte-compatible JS host mirror
is cross-checked by tests.
- Host: outbound connection manager, per-client tunnel dispatcher to the local
server over loopback, reuse of the existing instance identity key, and
management routes. Disabled by default; explicit opt-in.
- Client: plugs into the existing runtime layer (runtime-fetch/-url/-switch/
-auth, event pipeline, terminal, dictation) so features work over the relay
unchanged; direct-URL and Electron realtime-proxy paths are untouched.
Pairing & UX
- Relay section in Settings -> Remote Instances (live status, QR/link pairing,
revocation via the existing client-token list) and the mobile connect flow.
- Frame batching and idle-gated keepalive keep tunnel message volume low
without affecting streaming smoothness.
Security
- The tunnel is transport only; the server authenticates every tunneled
request exactly as for a direct remote client.
fragments only. The relay stores no keys, tokens, or payloads.
Operability
- The endpoint can be pinned to a self-hosted rel
paired clients inherit it from the offer automatically.
- Relay module DOCUMENTATION.md and a relay-trans
invariants that future WebSocket/streaming changes must follow.
The relay transport is complete and tested; the UI for enabling and pairing
is gated behind openchamber_relay_gate and stays
Bohdan Triapitsyn