feat(oci): separate using an instance principal from creating one (#1157)

* feat(oci): separate using an instance principal from creating one

The allocator needs OCI credentials at runtime, and a node with none forms,
passes every health check, then refuses every launch wanting a public address.
Instance principal is the credential route that puts no key material on a node,
but it needs a dynamic group and a policy, and those are tenancy-root resources
the compartment-scoped user the rest of the configuration runs as cannot create.

enable_instance_principal conflated the two, so the better credential route was
only reachable by a tenancy admin. instance_principal now takes off, adopt or
create: adopt selects the credential and creates nothing, because the matching
rule covers the whole compartment and so names no instance to reference.

setup-identity.sh owns the create case, with its own state. validate-topology.sh
destroys its state at the end of every run, so holding tenancy resources there
would let a teardown delete the tenancy's policy.

Also package install-node.sh and smoke-test.sh, so a cluster can be formed from
a curl | bash install with no checkout. smoke-test.sh is not optional: formation
scp's it from its own directory for the post-formation verification.

* feat(oci): take the credential handoff from an operator hook, and widen the workflow name

An API-key deployment needs a credential on each node, and nothing in this
repository can supply one: a key in user-data is readable from instance metadata
for the life of the instance, and this host runs other people's guests. A manual
install does not survive either, because a topology destroys itself on success.

So the harness calls an operator-owned executable after formation and before the
pool, the only window where a node has /etc/spinifex and has not started the
allocator. Instance principal needs no handoff, so the hook is skipped there.

The workflow is renamed for the vendors it will cover rather than the first one.
Nothing is orphaned in the Actions UI: it has never been on the default branch
and has never run, so there is no history attached to the old filename.

* docs(oci): the API-key path needs the config file, not just the PEM

oci_config_file names an ordinary OCI SDK config and nothing creates it, so a node
holding only the key forms and then fails every allocation with no stated cause.

* fix(ci): the runner context is not available in a job-level env block

A workflow referencing it there is rejected before any job starts, which is why
the rename produced a failed run attributed to the push. The reference had never
been validated: a dispatch-only workflow that is never dispatched is never parsed.

* fix(deps): bump containerd to v2.4.1 for GO-2026-6597

The image-pull DoS via crafted OCI index graph amplification is reachable from the ECS agent's containerd puller, so the vulnerability scan fails preflight on v2.4.0. A patch release with no API change.

* fix(e2e): probe guest public addresses from outside the cloud's own network

A VCN does not reflect its own public addresses back into itself, so a node asking for one gets nothing however well the datapath works. The workbook driver runs on the first node, so every assertion that curls or SSHes a guest's public address failed on OCI against a cluster that was serving those addresses correctly to the internet.

The driver now takes E2E_PUBLIC_PROXY, a SOCKS5 proxy used for public addresses only, and validate-topology.sh supplies one with a remote dynamic forward on the connection that launches the driver. Egress is then the host running the validation, which is outside the VCN and is where a customer sits. Unset leaves every other platform on a direct probe, which is already correct there.

Also adds --version TAG for a repeatable install, separates the workflow's auth choice from its external-pool choice so an API key can run with the allocator live, and captures allocator diagnostics before the teardown destroys them.

* ci: read the Go version from go.mod in the release workflows

Both pinned 1.27.0 by hand while every other workflow reads the file, so the toolchain they build with drifts from the one the module declares the day go.mod moves. release.yml was already inconsistent with itself: its second setup-go step reads spinifex/go.mod.

* feat: publish the OCI topology results as tables on the run page

A green tick on one job with 4,000 lines of log behind it is confidence for
whoever wrote the harness and nothing to anybody else. Someone assessing whether
Spinifex works on their cloud should be able to see that it formed and served
guests on a single VM, on three VMs and on bare metal without opening a log.

record now takes <gate> <status> [detail] and writes results.tsv beside the
human block, so a gate's status is a field the script sets rather than a regex
over prose that reads fine and matches wrong. record_workbooks turns the
driver's own go-test-shaped lines into workbooks.tsv, and runs on the failing
branch too: which four passed is most of what the fifth failing means.

e2e-oci.sh --summary-only renders both tables to stdout and to
GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY, and the workflow calls it under always() before the sweep,
because the sweep destroys the state directories the tables are read from. A
skipped gate gets its own mark, and a topology that never ran says so: the one
way a results table can do real harm is a reader taking an absent row for a
passing one.

* docs(oci): cut the deploy-by-hand appendix, and validate the config for real

The appendix was 444 of 1014 lines restating an install the Terraform already
does, which made the document read as though deploying by hand were a normal
route. It is not: the configuration builds the VCN, the volumes and both VNICs
per node and renders the cloud-init, in the same order every time. What is
genuinely OCI-specific is four things, each of which already has a section, so
the replacement names those and sends everyone else to the single-node and
multi-node install guides.

Verify end to end told the reader to ping a guest's public address from the
host, which cannot work: a VCN does not route its own public addresses back into
itself. That is the finding this branch is built on and the document was
asserting the opposite. It now says where to probe from and why, and carries the
allocator's `resolved the external VNIC` check, which existed only in the cut
appendix and is the one line proving the credentials and compartment are right.

`spx config validate` is not a command -- spx has admin, get, service, top and
version -- so that line could only ever fail and its output and status were both
discarded. It is replaced by parsing the TOML, which is what was wanted: the
remap and the pool append are textual edits, and a broken result would otherwise
surface as every service failing to start with nothing saying why. The remap now
checks its own substitution count for the same reason, since re.sub with no
match rewrites the file unchanged and exits 0.

Publication of the run-page tables moves to one owner. GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY is
per step, so appending from the run as well as the publish step would have put
two copies of every table on the run page.

* fix(oci): check the credential hook before building anything

The hook is a path from a CI variable, and whether it exists on the runner is
knowable before Terraform runs. Checked where it was used, a wrong path cost the
apply, the install and the formation first -- forty minutes and a bare-metal bill
to be told a file is missing. Nothing about the check depends on the apply, so it
moves to the top, where --dry-run reaches it too.

* fix(oci): the summary must say what was built and what was not tested

The first CI run headed its tables "Published release `latest channel`" over a
build of a feature branch, which is the one error in a results table that would
mislead a reader who trusted it. The header now states a tree build as a tree
build, and names how the allocator authenticated.

A run with no external pool says so in the header rather than leaving it to a
SKIPPED row further down. Public-address allocation is the claim a green table is
most likely to be read as making, and it is exactly the claim such a run cannot
support. Both flags are passed to the publish step too, so the summary rendered
after a failure describes the same run as the one that failed.

Raise the dev prerelease prune from five to twenty. A pinned dev tag is how an
external evaluator installs a specific build, and five is about a week of them --
short enough that the tag someone was handed stops resolving while they are still
using it.

* docs(oci): the workbook table is a snapshot, and the nightly is the current answer

It is dated against a build five releases of work ago, and the nightly now runs
the same workbooks on all three topologies and publishes its own table. Say which
one to read rather than letting a stale table be taken as current.

* ci: rename to e2e-cloudvendor.yml so the sidebar entry is registered from a valid file

A workflow's displayed name is captured when GitHub first registers it and is not
refreshed afterwards. Both OCI entries were registered from a run that could not
be parsed -- a job-level env block referencing runner.temp -- so both list as
their path, which reads as a missing name: key and is not one. The 2026-10-02 run
was green on all three topologies and the entry still read as a path, with
updated_at unchanged from the broken first run, so fixing the file is necessary
and not sufficient.

A new path is a new registration, and its first run reads a valid file. Dropping
-nightly is also more honest: there is no schedule: here, because GitHub
registers one only from the default branch, so a cron could never run dev and a
feature branch as separate nightlies.

* Revert "ci: rename to e2e-cloudvendor.yml so the sidebar entry is registered from a valid file"

The rename makes the workflow undispatchable. `gh workflow run` resolves a
filename against the default branch, and the raw dispatch endpoint returns 404
for a path GitHub has not registered -- checked twice, several minutes apart, so
it is not an indexing delay. The old name works only because it is already
registered, and an unrunnable workflow is a worse problem than a mislabelled one.

The sidebar label needs a fresh registration, which a rename cannot provide from
a feature branch. It corrects itself when the file reaches main, where GitHub
re-reads it; the alternative is deleting the dead registrations' runs, which is an
operator's call.

* fix(ci): never publish the credential hook's output as an artifact

The hook is the operator's own executable, and the one thing known about it is
that it handles a private key. Its stdout and stderr are captured to
credential-hook.log, which the artifact's *.log glob was collecting into a
downloadable archive with a fourteen-day retention.

Excluded rather than trusted to have been quiet. A hook that prints its key once
while someone is debugging it should not thereby publish it.

* fix(oci): the hairpin probe measured nothing on one node, and claimed too much

With a single host, HOSTS[0] and HOSTS[-1] are the same address, so the node
connected to itself -- which always succeeds. It reported "present" on vm-single
and bm for that reason and not as a measurement. It now needs two nodes and says
so otherwise.

The claim it carried was also wrong. "A VCN does not reflect its own public
addresses back into itself" was read off a workstation run whose
node_client_cidr_allow_list was narrowed to one office address, which makes a
node's own public address a non-permitted source: the refusal that follows is
identical to an absent hairpin. With the committed 0.0.0.0/0 default the probe
reports the hairpin present between two nodes, so the original reading was
confounded and is retracted.

None of this changes the remedy. A customer reaches a guest from outside the VCN,
which is where the proxy's egress is, and probing from there is correct whichever
of the two causes is in play -- 15 of 15 workbooks pass through it on all three
topologies. What changes is what the documentation may assert: the guide now names
both causes as indistinguishable rather than stating one as fact.

* docs(oci): a reader could not run the first command, because nothing told them to clone

The guide's first code block was `cd scripts/terraform/oci-spx`, into a directory
no step had obtained. It also never mentioned the SSH keypair the driver refuses to
start without, nor that the configuration is not on main or in v1.21.0 yet, so all
three had to be inferred from the deploy failing.

Restructured so the deploy comes first and reads as four steps and one command:
get the configuration, choose one node or three, write the inputs, run it. The
credential decision stays before step 4, because it changes an argument there and a
node without one forms, looks healthy, and then refuses every launch that wants a
public address. Everything else -- why OCI, sizing, the architecture, the IAM
policy, quotas, the oci CLI, what Terraform builds, every variable -- moves under
Reference, unchanged in substance.

Adds what a successful run prints, naming `allocator ready` as the line to look for:
every line above it appears on a node that cannot allocate, and that is the one
failure the run does not announce.

Also drops an empty verdict.txt committed from a local run. The directory the guide
now tells customers to work in should not ship one run's artifacts.

.github/workflows/dev-release.yml

@@ -75,7 +75,7 @@ jobs:
       - name: Set up Go
         uses: actions/setup-go@v7
         with:
-          go-version: "1.27.0"
+          go-version-file: spinifex/go.mod
 
       # The tag carries the describe string so the commit is recoverable from the
       # version alone, and the -dev suffix is what release.yml's own convention
@@ -167,6 +167,10 @@ jobs:
       # Kept rather than unbounded: the Worker reads the first page of releases to
       # resolve the channel, so enough prereleases would eventually push the real
       # ones off it, and each build carries two assets.
+      #
+      # Twenty, not five. A pinned dev tag is how an external evaluator installs a
+      # specific build, and five is about a week of them -- short enough that the tag
+      # someone was given stops resolving while they are still using it.
       - name: Prune old dev prereleases
         if: steps.version.outputs.exists != 'true'
         env:
@@ -174,7 +178,7 @@ jobs:
         run: |
           set -euo pipefail
           gh api "repos/$GITHUB_REPOSITORY/releases?per_page=100" \
-              --jq 'map(select(.prerelease and (.tag_name | endswith("-dev")))) | .[5:] | .[].tag_name' \
+              --jq 'map(select(.prerelease and (.tag_name | endswith("-dev")))) | .[20:] | .[].tag_name' \
               > stale.txt
           while read -r tag; do
               [ -n "$tag" ] || continue

.github/workflows/e2e-cloudvendor-nightly.yml

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-name: E2E OCI Nightly
+name: E2E Cloud Vendor Nightly
 
 # Dispatched by the same Cloudflare Worker that drives e2e-nightly.yml, once per
 # ref, rather than by a `schedule:` here. GitHub registers a schedule only from
@@ -28,6 +28,12 @@ on:
         required: false
         type: boolean
         default: false
+      auth:
+        description: "How nodes reach the OCI API: instance_principal (needs the tenancy dynamic group) or api_key (needs the credential hook)"
+        required: false
+        default: instance_principal
+        type: choice
+        options: [instance_principal, api_key]
       no_external_pool:
         description: "Form without the OCI allocator. Skips every workbook needing a public address."
         required: false
@@ -59,12 +65,17 @@ jobs:
     # Three topologies including a bare-metal build, each with its own install,
     # formation and workbook pass. The sweep still runs if this fires.
     timeout-minutes: 300
-    env:
-      # Outside github.workspace on purpose. actions/checkout runs git clean -ffdx,
-      # which on a persistent runner would delete the Terraform state of a killed
-      # run before the next sweep could read it, leaving instances nothing can find.
-      OCI_STATE_ROOT: ${{ runner.workspace }}/oci-state
     steps:
+      # Set here rather than in a job-level env block: the runner context is not
+      # available at job level, only from a step onwards, and a workflow that
+      # references it there is rejected as invalid before any job starts.
+      #
+      # Outside github.workspace on purpose. The checkout wipes untracked files, so
+      # on a persistent runner it would delete the Terraform state of a killed run
+      # before the next sweep could read it, leaving instances nothing can find.
+      - name: Put the Terraform state outside the checkout
+        run: echo "OCI_STATE_ROOT=$RUNNER_WORKSPACE/oci-state" >> "$GITHUB_ENV"
+
       - uses: actions/checkout@v7
         with:
           path: spinifex
@@ -121,12 +132,20 @@ jobs:
           OCI_TOPOLOGIES: ${{ inputs.topologies }}
           OCI_SOURCE: ${{ inputs.source }}
           OCI_CHANNEL: ${{ inputs.channel }}
-          # 1 unless the dispatch asked to form without the allocator, which is the
-          # only way to run before the tenancy's dynamic group exists. The run then
-          # records the allocator and the workbooks as SKIPPED rather than passing
-          # them, so a green run with this set is not a claim about guest networking.
-          OCI_INSTANCE_PRINCIPAL: ${{ inputs.no_external_pool && '0' || '1' }}
+          # Independent of the pool, deliberately. These were one switch, which made
+          # the combination we actually need -- an API key with the allocator running
+          # -- impossible to ask for, so public-IP allocation went untested.
+          OCI_INSTANCE_PRINCIPAL: ${{ inputs.auth == 'api_key' && '0' || '1' }}
+          # Skipping the pool records the allocator and every public-address workbook
+          # as SKIPPED, so a green run with this set is not a claim about guest
+          # networking. It exists for a formation-only check, not as a way past a
+          # missing credential.
           OCI_NO_EXTERNAL_POOL: ${{ inputs.no_external_pool && '1' || '0' }}
+          # Only an API-key run needs one: an instance principal is the node's own
+          # certificate, so there is nothing to hand over. Unset is not an error, and
+          # the allocator gate then fails rather than passing a node that cannot
+          # authenticate.
+          OCI_CREDENTIAL_HOOK: ${{ inputs.auth == 'api_key' && vars.OCI_CREDENTIAL_HOOK || '' }}
           OCI_ARTIFACT_DIR: ${{ runner.temp }}/e2e-oci
           OCI_KEEP_ON_FAIL: ${{ inputs.keep_on_fail && '1' || '0' }}
           # Through the environment, never interpolated into the script below: a
@@ -141,6 +160,29 @@ jobs:
           ./e2e-oci.sh 2>&1 | tee "$RUNNER_TEMP/e2e-oci.log"
           exit "${PIPESTATUS[0]}"
 
+      # Before the sweep, which destroys the state the tables are read from, and
+      # always(): a run whose verdict is a failure is exactly the one somebody
+      # wants a table for. The successful path writes the same tables itself, so
+      # this step is for the run that did not get there.
+      #
+      # The markdown lives in the script rather than here. A heredoc in a YAML
+      # string is the one place in this repository nothing can lint or run.
+      - name: Publish the result tables
+        if: always()
+        working-directory: spinifex/scripts/terraform/oci-spx
+        env:
+          OCI_REGION: ${{ vars.OCI_REGION || 'ap-sydney-1' }}
+          OCI_ARTIFACT_DIR: ${{ runner.temp }}/e2e-oci
+          OCI_TOPOLOGIES: ${{ inputs.topologies }}
+          OCI_SOURCE: ${{ inputs.source }}
+          OCI_CHANNEL: ${{ inputs.channel }}
+          SPX_REF: ${{ github.ref_name }}
+          # The same two the run step passes. The header states what was and was not
+          # tested, so a summary rendered without them would claim more than the run.
+          OCI_INSTANCE_PRINCIPAL: ${{ inputs.auth == 'api_key' && '0' || '1' }}
+          OCI_NO_EXTERNAL_POOL: ${{ inputs.no_external_pool && '1' || '0' }}
+        run: ./e2e-oci.sh --summary-only
+
       # always(), and before the artifact upload: an OCI bare-metal host left
       # running by a cancelled or timed-out job is the most expensive way this
       # workflow can fail. The sweep works from the Terraform state files, so it
@@ -178,7 +220,14 @@ jobs:
             ${{ runner.temp }}/e2e-oci.log
             ${{ runner.temp }}/e2e-oci/*.log
             ${{ runner.temp }}/e2e-oci/verdict.txt
+            ${{ runner.temp }}/e2e-oci/summary.md
             ${{ runner.temp }}/e2e-oci-sweep/*.log
             ${{ runner.workspace }}/oci-state/.validate-*/*.log
             ${{ runner.workspace }}/oci-state/.validate-*/*.txt
+            ${{ runner.workspace }}/oci-state/.validate-*/*.tsv
+            # The hook is the operator's own executable and the one thing known
+            # about it is that it handles a private key. Whatever it printed is not
+            # ours to publish in a downloadable artifact, so it is excluded rather
+            # than trusted to have been quiet.
+            !${{ runner.workspace }}/oci-state/.validate-*/credential-hook.log
           retention-days: 14

.github/workflows/release.yml

@@ -46,7 +46,7 @@ jobs:
       - name: Set up Go
         uses: actions/setup-go@v7
         with:
-          go-version: "1.27.0"
+          go-version-file: spinifex/go.mod
 
       - name: Build microVM artifacts (lb-agent + kernel + initramfs)
         run: cd spinifex && make build-microvm-image