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Console API

The console is a small set of loopback JSON routes that the magus daemon exposes so the hosted console (the Graph Explorer and the surfaces beside it) can display your current workspace.

The console holds no privileged access: it is one client of the same contract anyone can code against. The full schema - every service, method, message, and enum, generated from the .proto files - is the daemon API reference.

Most of these routes cannot change your workspace. They read what the daemon already knows: they cannot edit a file or change configuration. Most of the table below answers GET only and rejects any other method with a 405, with two named exceptions. POST /api/v1/diff/session records a person's own review state (where they are looking, which hunks they have read, what they said) in the cache directory and touches no source file. POST /api/v1/diff/run starts a run - the one read-surface route that is genuinely mutating, bounded to whatever targets the magusfile declares. This is a design decision, not just a security posture (see section 0.3 of the PWA plan).

What else can mutate sits beside this read surface rather than in it, and none of it runs an arbitrary command or writes into your working tree:

  • The job-control service, which submits a fixed set of maintenance jobs (reconcile the graph, rotate the activity trail or run-logs, clear the cache).
  • POST /api/v1/diff/session and POST /api/v1/diff/run, the two exceptions above.
  • POST /api/v1/share, which opens the time-boxed LAN listener described under what the console serves. It requires a loopback peer as well as the bearer token, so only the local console can trigger it.
  • magus.memory.v1alpha1.MemoryService, which edits your own handoff journal (magus memory). That journal lives in the user state directory outside the repository, so it is not workspace state either.

Every one of them is gated behind the same loopback bind and bearer token.

What the console serves

Every route on the console's /api/v1/ surface, enumerated:

Route Content
GET /api/v1/graph Merged knowledge graph (same bytes as magus graph export -o json)
GET /api/v1/graph?flavor=targets Target dependency graph (same as magus describe graph -o json)
GET /api/v1/graph?level=projects Project skeleton only: project nodes + project edges
GET /api/v1/graph?select=<terms> Scoped neighborhood (same query engine as magus query)
GET /api/v1/events SSE stream: event: graph when the workspace graph changes
GET /api/v1/insight Every insight lens: hotspots, affinity, ownership, trend, volatility
GET /api/v1/diff Working-tree changes annotated with role, blast radius, changed-symbol reach, and coverage (magus diff)
GET /api/v1/diff/patch The same changes as one unified patch, without the annotation (much cheaper)
GET /api/v1/diff/context Supporting context for a changed symbol (callers, definitions) beyond the patch itself
POST /api/v1/diff/session The human's half of a paired review: cursor, viewed marks, comments
GET /api/v1/diff/review Which review this branch has open on the forge, and what colleagues have already said on it
GET /api/v1/diff/branches Other branches changing the same files
POST /api/v1/diff/run Run a target against the working tree; the one MUTATING route in this table, bounded to what the magusfile declares
GET /api/v1/plan The derived run plan: the target DAG the engine resolves, with each node's live state
GET /api/v1/ledger The lease plan an agent declared; magus enforces none of it
GET /api/v1/attention The attention queue: blocks waiting on a person, same shape as magus session attention -o json
POST /api/v1/attention Dispose one request ({"id","reason"}). Nothing else closes one

One more route sits under /api/v1/ without belonging to this read surface: POST /api/v1/share, described below. The daemon's typed Connect services - status, activity, metrics, insight, viewer, memory, notes, tool, and job control - are mounted at their own magus.<service>.v1alpha1.<Service>/ prefixes rather than here, and the daemon API reference is their schema. The console mounts at /api/v1/ on the same port as the MCP server (127.0.0.1:7391 by default).

There is no GET /api/v1/status any more. The typed magus.status.v1alpha1.StatusService/GetStatus route replaced it and serves the same live snapshot plus observing_since and config on a typed wire contract; the console reads it there.

Who may write to a review session. POST /api/v1/diff/session is reachable only from the console and the CLI, so every write on it is stamped as the person's. An agent reaches the same session through the magus_diff MCP tool on /mcp - whose comment, suggest and resolve ops are writes too - and those are stamped as the agent's. Authorship is decided by which route the write arrived on and never by the payload, which is what makes it unforgeable: an agent cannot reach the human route, so it cannot post as the person.

The share subset is smaller on purpose. POST /api/v1/share opens an on-demand, time-boxed LAN listener behind a fresh read-only token, so you can watch a run from a phone. It serves only the plain-JSON events and insight routes, plus the metrics, activity, status, insight, and viewer Connect services (internal/daemon/daemon.go's shareGuarded map is the exact list). The viewer service is the typed twin of the run browser - a past run's journal holds the captured output plus the command that produced it, which a magus query output --open link has always carried in its fragment; the plain-JSON outputs/output/runs/run routes it replaced are retired (see docs/concepts/compatibility.md). --open (on magus run, magus affected, and magus query output) points a browser at the hosted log viewer by default; MAGUS_LOG_VIEWER_URL overrides that base for a self-hosted mirror, the same override magus query output --open --url takes as a flag (cmd/magus/live.go, cmd/magus/query.go). The tool Connect service is deliberately excluded even though it is read-only: it execs the argv a workspace's spells declare, which is not something a link handed to a phone should reach. graph, diff, diff/patch, diff/session, plan, ledger, /mcp and the job service are deliberately loopback-only too: a working diff is unreviewed source, a plan names every target in the workspace, and a share link is a URL handed to a phone. A leaked share link reaches the small set and nothing else.

Error bodies. When a route fails (5xx), the response body contains err.Error() detail to help an authenticated loopback caller diagnose the problem. This detail is returned only to a caller that has already passed the bearer-token check.

Symbol shards (@symbols) are NOT loaded for the default /api/v1/graph call. They are loaded only when ?select=<terms> uses a symbol-seeding query (a symbol: prefix or kind:symbol). This preserves the lazy-load contract: symbol data stays opt-in.

Uncached variants. The ?level=projects and ?flavor=targets query params reparse the workspace target graph on every request (they call DescribeGraph which reads the cached in-memory target graph but does not cache the variant serialization). This is a known limitation; memoization per variant is deferred.

Job control

Separate from the read routes above, the daemon hosts a mutating Connect service, magus.job.v1alpha1.JobService, so a browser client (or the CLI) can trigger background maintenance without an open action endpoint. It is the only surface that changes anything magus computed - the others record a person's own review state, open a share listener, or edit their handoff journal - and it is bounded: it submits a fixed set of named jobs, never an arbitrary command.

The service exposes two RPCs, not one per job: RunJob(name) submits any registered job by its resource name (jobs/{job}), and ListJobs reports every job's running state, last run, and target size. A job name nobody registered is a NotFound error rather than a third RPC.

Job Effect
sync-graph Reconcile the knowledge graph to current source
rotate-activities Trim the activity trail to its cap
rotate-logs Trim the invocation run-log journals to their cap
clear-cache Invalidate cached build entries
check-review Note when a review this tree took part in has merged

Each submit is fire-and-forget and coalesced (an identical in-flight job is not started twice) and returns a metadata snapshot - the job's last run and the current size of what it maintains. The service is mounted behind the same loopback bind and bearer token as everything else here; it is never served unauthenticated.

Two doors reach it. In the console, the Activity surface carries a maintenance control above the trail: it lists every registered job with its running state, last run and target size (ListJobs), and each row runs that job (RunJob). It sits on Activity because a job's result is a trail entry - what a job did is read on that surface, so what starts it belongs there. From a terminal, magus server job <name> submits the same jobs down the same path. The control exists because the console is where the prompt to run one already fires: the daemon-storage notification watches the cache figure from inside the console, and used to end by naming a shell command, so the surface that noticed the problem could not act on it.

How it is secured

Loopback only. The console refuses to mount on any non-loopback bind address. If you set mcp.address to a non-loopback IP (for k8s or LAN use), the console logs a warning and does not register its routes.

Bearer token. Every request must carry Authorization: Bearer <token>. The token is the same one the MCP server uses. Retrieve it with:

magus config token print

The token is stored on disk (~/.config/magus/mcp-token) and never logged.

DNS-rebind guard. The console shares the MCP server's host-header check. A request whose Host header does not resolve to the loopback range is rejected with 403 before the bearer token is examined.

CORS. Access-Control-Allow-Origin is set only for:

  • The hosted Graph Explorer origin (https://eli.gladman.cc)
  • http://localhost:<port> (local site development)
  • http://127.0.0.1:<port> (local site development)

Any other origin gets no CORS headers. The browser will block its own cross-origin request before any data is read.

Chrome Private Network Access. When Chrome sends the Access-Control-Request-Private-Network: true preflight header (Private Network Access spec), the console replies with Access-Control-Allow-Private-Network: true. Without this, Chrome 94+ blocks requests from an HTTPS page to a loopback address. Expect a one-time permission prompt in Chrome when you first connect the explorer.

Safari limitation

Safari blocks fetch requests from an HTTPS page to http://127.0.0.1 (mixed content). The console will not work in Safari's live mode. Use magus graph export --open --serve instead, which runs an ephemeral loopback server with a matching same-origin response and opens the graph via a #src= fragment that is served directly.

Kill switch

Disable the console in magus.yaml:

console:
  enabled: false

Or via environment variable: MAGUS_CONSOLE_ENABLED=false.

Privacy statement

The console serves your workspace graph over loopback. It does not:

  • Send data to any external service
  • Log request payloads
  • Store anything beyond what the daemon already caches on disk, plus the review state a person records through POST /api/v1/diff/session
  • Accept a write into your working tree, or edit a file or change configuration. It CAN run a target - POST /api/v1/diff/run - but only one the magusfile declares, the same as magus run at a terminal
  • Expose any path outside the routes listed above

The hosted explorer page loads your graph via the bearer-authenticated fetch. The graph data never appears in a URL (fragments are used for the fragment delivery mode; the live mode uses an Authorization header that browsers do not log in the address bar).

magus doctor check

magus doctor reports console reachability when the daemon is running:

[pass] console: reachable at http://127.0.0.1:7391/api/v1/graph
    bearer token: magus config token print

When the daemon is not running, the check is skipped (not a failure). When console.enabled: false is set, the check reports that the console is disabled.

Live mode pairing

magus graph export --open --follow opens the explorer connected to the running daemon.

How to pair

  1. Start the daemon: magus server start
  2. Run magus graph export --open --follow (or --follow --print to copy the URL)
  3. The explorer shows a live: <workspace> badge and updates within seconds of file changes

The link is served from the daemon's own loopback origin, e.g. http://127.0.0.1:7391/console/graph/#token=<bearer> (the origin names which daemon; the token rides the fragment). The page:

  • Confirms its own origin is literally 127.0.0.1 or [::1] before making any fetch
  • Consumes the token and strips it from the URL via history.replaceState
  • Stores the token in sessionStorage (tab lifetime) unless you tick "Remember this workspace", which moves it to localStorage

Zero-arg default: a plain magus graph export --open with no flags checks if the daemon is running. If it is, it automatically picks --follow. Otherwise it falls back to the #data= fragment.

Two-state model

The explorer has exactly two source states:

State Badge What it means
snapshot snapshot: <provenance> Data from fragment/file/demo/--serve; frozen at load time
live live: <workspace> Data from the daemon; refreshes on file changes

"Connected but stale" is impossible: when the SSE stream disconnects, a banner appears ("disconnected - showing workspace as of HH:MM, reconnecting...") and auto-reconnect runs with exponential backoff (1s to 30s). The data stays visible while reconnecting.

Safari limitation

Safari blocks fetch requests from an HTTPS page to http://127.0.0.1 (mixed content). Live mode cannot connect in Safari. Use magus graph export --open --serve instead: it runs an ephemeral loopback server and opens the graph via a #src= fragment that is compatible with Safari's same-origin restriction.

Target graph in live mode

magus graph export --open --follow --targets opens the live target dependency graph: http://127.0.0.1:7391/console/graph/#token=<bearer>&flavor=targets

Affected view

When the daemon has computed an affected set (from magus affected in a CI context), the pool in the magus.status.v1alpha1.StatusService/GetStatus response carries an affected array of node ids. The "What does my diff touch?" view is enabled automatically and paints those nodes.

Verify our claims - don't take our word for it

Your dependency graph may be confidential. Every claim below is either enforced by your browser or checkable by you. Nothing on this page asks for trust.

Claim: this page cannot send your graph or source code anywhere

Every page on this site carries a Content-Security-Policy that your browser enforces - a <meta> tag near the top of the document that is the page's complete network permission, in one line.

  1. Press Ctrl+U (macOS: Cmd+Option+U) to view the page source. Find the <meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" ...> tag (it sits right after <meta name="generator" content="magus">). Its connect-src clause - the directive that governs fetch/XMLHttpRequest/SSE, the ways a page could actually exfiltrate data - reads connect-src 'self' http://127.0.0.1:* http://[::1]:*: this page's own origin, plus your machine's loopback address, and nothing else. default-src 'self' closes the same same-origin-only gap for anything not named by a more specific directive.

    img-src is a narrower, deliberately scoped exception, and it is not the same on every page: an img-src GET can technically carry data baked into its URL (unlike connect-src, the browser does not refuse it), so the graph and playground pages - the only pages that ever hold your dependency graph or source code - carry img-src 'self' data: with no external host at all. There is no image-URL channel on those pages for your data to ride out on. Only the home page's img-src also allows https://github.com and https://pkg.go.dev, for two static status badges (CI result, doc coverage). Those badge URLs are fixed strings compiled into the page; nothing on the home page builds an image URL from anything you typed or loaded there.

  2. Watch Chrome enforce it. Press F12 to open DevTools, pick the Console tab, and paste: fetch("https://example.com") Chrome refuses, and the error message quotes the policy back to you: "Refused to connect ... because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: connect-src ...". That refusal is your browser, not our code.

  3. One deliberate narrowing this policy causes: the graph page's #src=<url> loader and the playground's #src=<url> loader can both point at an arbitrary CORS-enabled address (e.g. a colleague's raw GitHub link) - that fetch is refused by the same connect-src for any host that is not this site or your loopback. Both loaders already handle a fetch failure gracefully (a status message, not a crash); use #data= (a local file, drag-and-drop, or magus graph export --open's default fragment) or a loopback source (magus graph export --open --serve / --follow) instead.

Claim: your graph never appears in any network request

When you use magus graph export --open, your graph travels in the URL fragment (the part after #). Browsers never include fragments in HTTP requests - that's the HTTP standard, not our promise.

  1. Open DevTools (F12) -> Network tab. Tick Preserve log.
  2. Load your graph: run magus graph export --open in your workspace, or drag a graph.json onto the console's Graph Explorer.
  3. Read the request list. Every row is a GET for a static file from this site's own origin (or, in live mode, your own loopback address). Click any row - the Payload tab is absent (no request carries a body). Compare any request's URL against your address bar: the #data=... portion appears in none of them.
  4. Type method:POST into the Network filter box: zero results for the snapshot flow these steps describe. In live mode there is one exception, and it goes to your own machine: the typed daemon services (status, activity, metrics) are Connect RPCs, and Connect sends a read as a POST. Those requests are addressed to 127.0.0.1 and carry a request message, never your graph - the same connect-src policy above is what confines them to loopback.

Claim: everything works with your network unplugged

The strongest proof: data cannot leave a machine that has no connection.

  1. Visit the graph or playground page once while online (the service worker caches it - see DevTools -> Application -> Service workers and Cache storage).
  2. Go offline for real (Wi-Fi off / cable out), or in DevTools -> Network tab set the throttling dropdown from No throttling to Offline.
  3. Reload. The page comes back - served from your disk. Now load your confidential graph (drag the file in) and explore it fully. The page shows an "offline - everything on this page is local" badge while disconnected (docs/src/site/offline-badge.ts).

Claim: we store nothing without asking

DevTools -> Application tab -> Cookies: none. Local storage / Session storage: empty, unless you used live mode - the daemon token is kept in session storage under the magus-live-token key for the tab's lifetime, or promoted to local storage only after you tick "Remember this workspace" (see "Live mode pairing" above). Ticking it also sets a second local-storage key, magus-live-remember, so the explorer knows to keep reading from local storage on your next visit - two keys once you tick it, zero before that and zero if you never use live mode. Clear either with one click, right there.

The deep audit: record every byte Chrome sends

For a security review, don't sample - record. chrome://net-export captures a log of all network activity in the browser, below the page's ability to hide anything.

  1. Open chrome://net-export, choose a log file, press Start Logging to Disk.
  2. In another tab, load this page and your graph; explore for a minute.
  3. Stop logging. The log is a local JSON file on your disk - search it for any project or target name from your graph. For sensitive graphs, grep the file locally rather than uploading it to a log viewer.

Claim: the code running here is the code in the repo

This site is generated from the open magus repository by a CI-checked build; the served bytes are not, themselves, committed. console/gen/ (the console's build output) is entirely gitignored - git ls-files console/gen lists nothing - and docs/gen/ (the docs site) commits only a handful of carve-outs (the installer script, the signed release and registry manifests), not the rendered HTML/JS. So "compare against the repo's committed copy" is not something you can do against a checkout as it sits; what you can do:

  • Build it yourself from source (magus run build docs for the docs site; console/README.md for the console's own pnpm build) and diff the output against what the site serves.
  • Read the CI workflow that publishes it (.github/workflows/cd.yaml) to confirm the published bytes are exactly what that build produces from the commit it ran on, with nothing hand-edited in between.

site-manifest.sha256 (at the site root, e.g. https://eli.gladman.cc/magus/site-manifest.sha256) lists every served file with its SHA-256, in sha256sum(1) format, so a rebuild-and-diff has something to check against without re-downloading every asset:

curl -s <asset-url> | sha256sum

The JavaScript is unminified enough to read; start at the console's console/src/console/graph/main.ts - loadGraph and readGraphFile are the functions that ingest a graph (the #data=/#src=/demo fallback chain, and drag-drop/file-input/launchQueue respectively), and there is no function that sends it out.

A locally built console is not limited to the hosted site's copy: the daemon's LAN share listener (POST /api/v1/share) and its own /console/ mount both resolve which built console to serve via resolveConsoleDir (internal/daemon/share.go), which honors MAGUS_CONSOLE_DIR as an override before falling back to <workspace root>/console/gen. Point it at a console you built and audited yourself to serve that copy instead of trusting any prebuilt one.

The one nuance: the service worker is not covered by this policy

A <meta>-delivered Content-Security-Policy governs the page's own requests. It does not govern requests the service worker (sw.js) makes on the page's behalf while intercepting fetch events - that is a documented gap in the CSP spec, not a bug in this implementation. The mitigation is that the service worker's source, docs/sw.js.tmpl, is about 60 lines total, committed, and its fetch handler returns early on any cross-origin request before it ever considers serving or caching one:

if (url.origin !== self.location.origin) return;

(sw.js.tmpl line 42.) Read the whole file - it precaches a fixed list of same-origin assets, serves HTML network-first, and serves everything else cache-first. There is nothing else in it. If this site ever moves to a host that supports real HTTP response headers, the CSP (and a policy that also covers the service worker, via Service-Worker-Allowed scoping and a worker-side CSP) will be promoted to headers and the <meta> tag kept only as a fallback for hosts that cannot set headers.

The opt-out: remove us entirely

If your threat model excludes our hosting altogether: clone the repo, run magus run generate docs, and serve the gen/ directory on your own network. Every page here is origin-agnostic and works identically. (magus ships no general-purpose static file server for hosting this site; the only servers it binds are the ephemeral loopback --serve graph server and the loopback daemon console documented above.)

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Glossary

Workspace

The magus root directory that owns a set of projects and shared config; the unit magus operates over. See workspace.

Project

A directory magus recognizes as a unit of work (it has a magusfile); the unit of caching, scheduling, and dependency tracking. See workspace.

Magusfile

The magusfile.buzz that declares a project's targets (as export funs) and binds its spells. See targets.

Target

A named operation (build, test, ...) you invoke with magus run <target>; it may compose a spell's tool-native operations and depend on other targets. See targets.

Op

A single tool-native command a target composes (long form: operation); the middle of the work hierarchy (Spell to Op to Target). See operations.

Spell

A language/runtime adapter (e.g. go, md) that maps generic targets onto a toolchain's real commands. See spells.

Engine

The interpreter a magusfile runs on; magus embeds the Buzz engine. See engines.

Cache

The content-addressed store magus consults before running a target, so unchanged work is skipped. See cache.

Affected

The set of projects touched by a change; magus affected <target> runs a target only over them. See affected.

Service

A long-running or shared process magus manages across runs, distinct from a one-shot target. See services.

Daemon

The background magus host that owns shared state such as services and the warm knowledge graph. See daemon.

CI

An ordinary magusfile-defined target you compose yourself with magus\needs - magus does not hardcode its stages. Magus.RunCI treats it specially only in that it strips the rw charm, it is the anchor magus affected ci keys off, and a selected scope with no project declaring it is a load error rather than a silent no-op. See targets.

Pool

The concurrency pool: the shared set of slots that caps how many targets run in parallel on one machine. Its capacity defaults to MAGUS_CONCURRENCY, then 4 on GitHub-hosted runners, then min(NumCPU, 8); magus status and the dashboard report it live. See daemon.

Snapshot

A point-in-time view of live state - the pool's occupancy or a tick of exported metrics - as opposed to accumulated history. See daemon.

Volatility

A target that fails once and passes on rerun is volatile, as opposed to a regression that started failing and stays failing. magus keeps per-target pass/fail history and a Wilson-score volatility rate to tell them apart and auto-retry the noise. See volatility.

Knowledge graph

The queryable graph of a workspace's spells, targets, docs, and code relationships; query it with magus query/explain/path. See knowledge.

Insight

The reports magus derives over the graph and history (hotspots, affinity, ownership, trend, volatility, unreferenced). See insight.

Hotspot

An insight lens: edit frequency times complexity, the prime refactoring targets. The project view heat-colors the dependency graph by churn; --files ranks individual files. See insight.

Affinity

An insight lens: projects that change together (temporal coupling). A pair that co-changes without either declaring a dependency on the other is a candidate architectural smell. See insight.

Ownership

An insight lens: author concentration - the primary author and their share, the distinct-author count (the bus factor), and abandonment. See insight.

Trend

An insight lens: the recent half of the window against the earlier half. A positive delta is a rising hotspot; a negative one is cooling. See insight.

Session

One magus process's recorded facts - the targets it finished, their outcomes, and the lease it acted as - kept in a repo-scoped store every worktree shares. magus session lists them; the store prunes itself by last-fact age.

Dispose

The human act of closing an attention request: a judgment rendered, recorded with who and why. Distinct from resolving a review thread or a merge conflict - a disposition answers a request; it does not merge anything.

Lease

One row of the lease ledger: a piece of work an orchestrating agent handed out, with its goal, the checkpoint it was cut against, and the paths it owns or must not touch. The ledger records; the agent guard is what reads those facts back when grading a write. See doctrine.

Conventions

Placeholders

Angle brackets mark a value you replace with your own - never type the brackets:

magus run <target>
magus completion <shell>    # e.g. bash, zsh, fish

<target>, <path>, <shell>, <name> and the like are stand-ins, not literal text.