wacli sign-in: a paired wacli reads as signed in, "already signed in" instead of waiting, and a sign-in that shows nothing ends with a reason (#98) - #100

What the operator saw

On a hosted personal Machine (Launchpad 0.1.8-rc.7 as a systemd user unit), Settings → Tools listed wacli 0.18.2 as "Nepřihlášeno" (not signed in) with a "Přihlásit" button. The operator clicked it. The dialog showed the step "Waiting for you: in progress" and the sentence "Starting the sign-in…" twice, as the status line and as the detail, and no QR code ever appeared. Afterwards the Launchpad's journal had no line about the sign-in. The same dialog signed in to composio without a problem.

Proven cause on the Machine: wacli was already signed in, and the Platform could not see it

Observed on the Machine with the operator's account, with the unit's PATH and HOME, no TTY and stdin /dev/null (only event kinds and shapes were recorded, never values):

• wacli auth status --json answers {"success":true,"data":{"authenticated":true,"linked_jid":…,"phone":…},"error":null}.
• wacli auth --events --idle-exit 30s emits auth_starting, warning, connected (0.8 s), offline_sync_completed, warning ×2 and app_state_recovery_requested, then idle_exit (33 s), one plain text line, and exit status 0. There is no qr_code event, because the store was paired before.

What the code did with that:

1. The sign-in state probe read the wrong fields. The catalog probe for wacli is wacli auth status --json --read-only. It is run from the Launchpad on page load and on refresh (signIn: true), for 10 s, with only PATH/HOME/XDG. It read authenticated, phone and linked_jid at the top level of the answer (src/tools/catalog.ts wacli signInProbe, flag: ["authenticated"]). wacli 0.18.2 wraps every --json answer in {"success","data","error"} (internal/out/out.go, WriteJSON). So at(document, ["authenticated"]) was undefined, and readSignIn returned signed-out (src/tools/status.ts:351). Every paired wacli therefore showed as "Nepřihlášeno"; the state was "not signed in", not "unknown", which shows the probe did run. The test stand-ins had used the same top-level shape, so the tests never caught it.
2. The sign-in flow waited for a challenge that never comes. connected triggered the probe, and the probe said "not yet" because of point 1. The session then waited for a QR code that an already-paired wacli never prints.
   • On main, a stand-in that replays the observed event stream ends as failed with not-confirmed once the process exits. On the Machine that is after about 33 s.
   • Until then, the dialog showed "Starting the sign-in…": twice while the start request was out (up to 20 s), and in the detail afterwards.

Further hang paths, fixed as additional hardening

• The same sentence twice: before this PR, startLogin (src/launchpad/tools-panel.ts:346-348) put toolsLoginStarting into both the status line and the body.
• No deadline in the page: the start and poll requests had none (src/launchpad/ui.ts:231-243), and Close cannot cancel a session whose handle the page never got (tools-panel.ts:683).
• No bound for a silent tool: a tool that printed nothing was bounded only by its 5-minute lifetime, which then ended as a misleading "expired".
• No journal: src/tools/login.ts wrote nothing on a start or an end.

The QR delivery itself was never broken: with --events, wacli prints qr_code as NDJSON on stderr whatever the TTY, and the Launchpad reads stderr. The tests prove this without a terminal.

What changes

• The wacli probe reads wacli's envelope: data.authenticated must be true; the account label is data.phone, else data.linked_jid. A success:false answer, or the old top-level shape, is not signed in.
• An already-paired wacli is reported as such: connected without a QR or pairing code first ends the sign-in, once the probe confirms it, as signed-in with already: true, usually within a second. The dialog says "{name} was already signed in on this Machine (as {account}); nothing was paired or changed." (Czech and English) and reads the card state again. wacli finishes its own sync to its idle exit in the background, as after a pairing. The CLI says the same.
• An unconfirmed connected also ends with a reason: only the check confirms a sign-in. If it has not confirmed 20 s after connected (it is retried every 2 s), and always within the one-minute limit, and no code was shown, the process group is killed and the sign-in ends as failed with not-confirmed. A session that has shown a QR or pairing code keeps its 5-minute pairing lifetime, as before. The not-confirmed sentence now says the sign-in was not completed and was stopped, instead of "the tool ended".
• Silent tools end with a reason: a sign-in that shows no link, code or QR code within one minute, and has not reported connected, is killed and ends as failed with the fixed code no-challenge. gh's "Link SSH key" is not affected; its steps have their own bounds.
• The journal names every sign-in. The Launchpad writes one JSON line when a sign-in starts and one when it ends, with the tool, the outcome and the fixed reason code only. Example: {"scope":"tools-login","tool":"wacli","event":"end","outcome":"failed","reason":"no-challenge"}. It never carries output, a challenge, a phone number or a JID.
• The dialog:
  • The status line and the detail never show the same sentence.
  • Each request is awaited for at most 45 s; after that the dialog ends with "The Launchpad did not answer in time", and a poll that gets no answer also cancels its session.
  • The endings not-installed, spawn-failed, tool-exit and no-challenge now say what to do next.
• Account identifiers: the account label (the phone number, else the JID) appears only where a signed-in account label already appeared: the card and the "signed in" sentence, plain text of at most 120 characters (signInLabel). It never reaches the journal.
• Docs:
  • docs/environment-tools.md: the probe shape, "already signed in", no-challenge and the journal lines.
  • docs/launchpad-development.md: the dialog.
  • An F19 addendum in docs/decisions.md, because how a session ends and what the probe reads changed.

What does not change

The wacli command lines, the QR drawing, the lifetimes, the composio and gh flows, the redaction rules in src/tools/redact.ts, and the rule that a challenge never reaches a log. No new process wrapper, pty or second state machine.

How it was verified

• New route tests in tests/launchpad-wacli-sign-in.test.ts drive /api/tools/login/start|poll|cancel and /api/tools/status against stand-in wacli executables. HOME and XDG live in temporary directories, there is no network, and all values are fictional. The stand-ins:

  • replays the observed event stream of an already-paired wacli, with the idle exit shortened to 1.5 s. It ends as signed-in, already: true in under 5 s, the status route then reads signed in, and the process exits on its own idle;
  • prints a QR code late on stderr, with no terminal on any stream;
  • prints a QR code on stderr only, with stdout closed;
  • exits at once with a non-zero status (tool-exit);
  • prints nothing and keeps running (no-challenge within the bound, process killed);
  • is missing from PATH (not-installed);
  • reports connected while its status check keeps answering not signed in (the reviewer's case). It ends as not-confirmed within the bound, and the process is killed.

  Each test also checks the journal (start and end, no payload, no phone number).

• The probe's shapes are in tests/tools.test.ts: signed in with phone and JID, JID only, not authenticated, a non-boolean flag, the former top-level shape, and the error envelope on stderr. The shared fake wacli in tests/fixtures/fake-login-tools.ts now prints the real envelope.

• View tests in tests/tools-view.test.ts: the status and the detail differ in both languages, no-challenge and already are parsed and have their sentences, and a request that never settles is bounded.

• On unchanged main, the already-paired replay ends as not-confirmed, the silent stand-in stays pending, and the others fail on the journal checks.

• bun run check passes on 731eaae: lint (332 files), typecheck, bun test 1034 pass, 7 skip, 0 fail (1041 tests, 118 files), check:public PASS (389 files), proof build and smoke PASS. Two earlier runs under heavy machine load (load average about 30) each had 2 unrelated tests hit the 5 s bun timeout (in recover, git-checkout and legacy-paths); each of those passes when run alone.

What could NOT be verified

None of this was run with the real wacli binary, and no real WhatsApp pairing was done on a real Machine. Specifically:

• The already-paired stream is a replay of the event kinds and order that were observed, not the tool's real data.
• Whether a fresh pairing on that Machine's network shows its first QR code within one minute is not proven.
• The observed wacli would, on main, have ended the dialog as not-confirmed after about 33 s. The report only describes the "Starting the sign-in…" phase, and that difference is not explained by anything available here. The journal line added by this PR will name the outcome of the next attempt.

Closes #98

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