A token lasts 30 days and only a browser login yields one — the account is
federated, so the server cannot mint it. Replacing it meant editing .env and
recreating the container, every month.
`schulcloud token set` (a hidden prompt, or piped input) and a /token page
both send it to PUT /api/token. The server checks it with Schulcloud first —
well-formed, unexpired, still logged in, the same account — then swaps it
into the config every request reads, restarts the keepalive and saves it in
STATE_DIR, a new volume, with mode 0600. At startup the newer of the saved
token and TSC_JWT_COOKIE wins, unless they belong to different accounts. A
refused paste changes nothing, and the token is never logged.
The keepalive's pings carry a generation, so a 401 for the old token that
arrives after a swap cannot stop the new cycle. `schulcloud token`, whoami
and the log report the expiry and warn a week ahead.
Found on the way: a host that is off for more than two hours loses the
session however long the token has left — this machine lost it overnight —
which is what the always-on Pi is for.
174 tests. Smoke 72/72 on the local instance, and a real swap verified end to
end there.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Many teachers never use topics or boards; their material sits in the
course's file area, and the tools answered "0 files" for courses holding
dozens of worksheets — 21 of 26 courses on the live account. Persönliche,
Kurs-, Team- and Geteilte Dateien live in the legacy file store, not in
files-storage, and its service is not in the public ingress. The only way in
is the legacy client: HTML listings, and GET /files/signedurl for a
pre-signed download.
core/legacy-files.ts turns that into one path tree — /my, /courses/<course>,
/teams/<team>, /shared — resolving names that contain "/", ids anywhere in a
path, and wrong or ambiguous names with a message saying what is there. A
listing that does not parse throws; it never reads as an empty folder.
Some of the legacy client's GET routes write (GET /files/share/ mints a
share token), so getFileManagerPage allows only the listing routes, by
pattern. Signed URLs are fetched with no credentials and must be https.
- MCP: fs_list, fs_tree, fs_find and fs_read; get_course lists course files.
- CLI: schulcloud fs ls, tree, find and get, recursive and resumable.
- API: /api/fs/list, tree, find and file.
- Index: the crawl walks the file manager (INDEX_FILE_MANAGER, on by
default), so search covers the text inside those files and sync mirrors
them under <course>/Kurs-Dateien.
The local instance gains a fixture for all four areas. It needed a loopback,
so signed URLs open from the host, and a pre-created bucket, since MinIO
does not implement PutBucketCors.
135 tests. Smoke 55/55 live; 57/57 and 55/55 on the local instance.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
With .env pointing at the real account, testing against the local instance
became dangerous: process env beats --env-file, so a local smoke run would
crawl fixtures straight into the live index, where a per-course refresh
carries them forward indefinitely. mcp-env.sh now pins its own database
(schulcloud_local) and mirror as well as the instance.
The override publishes the server on MCP_HOST_PORT and takes
CRAWL_INTERVAL_MS from .env, since what_changed can only report what
happened between crawls. The build context leaves out tmp/, which holds a
mirror of the account's files, and local-instance/.
probe checks live what the gap fixes established locally: the /api/v1 course
and user routes, classes, room allowedOperations as an object, and the
preview enums on a real file. A failure there means a feature degrades
rather than breaks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every area — courses, rooms, boards, topics, tasks, files, quizzes, teams,
groups, submissions, grades — was checked for data the instance has and the
tools did not show.
Grades and feedback. A teacher's /homework page is a different page from a
student's: grade and comment live in the grading form, one block per
submission, so a teacher account reported every graded submission as having
neither. parseTeacherGrading reads the form, and list_submissions can now
include the written feedback and who handed the work in.
Names. /api/v1 is partly served: courses, users and classes survive in the
deployment's ingress table, and users/{id} is the only route from an id to a
name. Submitters, file creators and course teachers resolve through it, and
degrade to "not visible to this account" where a student may not read them.
Courses, rooms and classes. get_course adds the description, teachers,
member count and weekly timetable from /api/v1/courses. list_classes is new.
get_room reports what the account may do — allowedOperations is an object of
booleans, not the list it was typed as — and applicants and invitation links
where it may manage them.
Board and topic content. Link descriptions, image alt text, drawing and
video-conference titles, the ids behind external tools and H5P content (the
only thing resembling a quiz), and what a deleted element used to be. Topic
Etherpad pads are read like board pads, and htmlToText keeps table columns
apart and drops template indentation.
Files. A scan with no text layer falls back to the preview endpoint, whose
width and outputFormat are undocumented enums, so Claude gets a picture of
the page; list_files reports counts and sizes. Teams stay documented as
unreadable at any API version; their files come later.
What the crawl missed. Tasks attached to topics (18 of 60 on the live
account), each course's own file area, and — behind INDEX_PERSONAL_FILES —
personal files and submissions with their grade comments, so search and
what_changed cover grading. A submission hit points at get_task.
The local instance's preview profile gets an ImageMagick policy that allows
the coders its 7.1.2 build needs; the image's own denies them all.
110 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The CLI talks only to the Pi's /api surface and holds no Schulcloud
credential — only the same bearer token the Claude connector uses. That
is not layering for its own sake: a Schulcloud session dies after two
hours idle and a CLI process lives for seconds, so a CLI with its own
token would be dead most times you reached for it. Routing through the
Pi means one session, one keepalive, one monthly cookie paste.
sync is a one-way mirror, which follows from the data rather than from
scope-cutting: file records are immutable upstream, so there is no
versioning, no conflict resolution and no merge. State is keyed by file
record id with the path as derived output, so an upstream rename moves
the local file instead of duplicating it — verified against the live
server. Verification is size-only because the download endpoint exposes
no ETag and Schulcloud publishes no hash; size still catches the failure
that happens, a truncated download. Downloads land on a .part neighbour
and are renamed, so an interrupted run leaves no half-file that a later
run mistakes for complete. Deletions are reported but not propagated —
a teacher removing a worksheet is no reason to destroy the student's
copy — with --prune to opt in.
what_changed now clamps to the oldest stored generation instead of
refusing, and says it did: "what's new this week" is a reasonable
question to ask a two-day-old index.
Two build bugs caught by the checks rather than by luck: the smoke
harness constructed the app without services, so the index-backed tools
were never exercised; and the Docker build could not see
scripts/copy-assets.mjs, so the image would have shipped without
migrations and silently degraded to live-only.
67 unit tests (9 needing Postgres), smoke green both ways — 34 checks
with an index, 32 without, because graceful degradation is a supported
mode and not a fallback nobody runs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Neither of my two hypotheses was right, and the upstream source was
correct all along. The jwt cookie copied from the browser IS the
browser's session token — same jti — so this server and the tab share
one session, and the tab ends it:
1. nuxt-client sets a purely client-side timer, sessionTimeoutTimestamp
= now + JWT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS, reset only on route change
(watch(router.currentRoute, startTimer)) — never by API activity and
never read back from the server's TTL.
2. AutoLogoutWarning.vue warns at JWT_SHOW_TIMEOUT_WARNING_SECONDS.
3. At zero, autoLogout() -> location.replace('/logout?auto-logout=true').
4. schulcloud-client controllers/login.js:439 -> POST /api/v3/logout
-> removeJwtFromWhitelist(jwt) -> the shared key is deleted.
That explains the endurance failure exactly: the GET pings at t+0/30/60/90
were sliding the Valkey TTL correctly, and then the tab deleted the key.
It also explains the ~1h warning dialog appearing in a tab the user
considers in use — the timer only resets on navigation.
So the sliding TTL is real and a keepalive does hold a session to the
30-day ceiling. The operational fix is not to ping harder but to close
the Schulportal window after copying the cookie; a private window is the
tidy way. This is now the loudest caveat in the token-copying steps,
because it is the single easiest way to break the setup.
Keeping refresh-session rather than reverting to GET, now for a reason
that stands on its own: it states the intent contractually instead of
relying on extend-on-check as a side effect of an unrelated read (that
whitelist has been refactored twice in 2026, and a GET keepalive would
fail silently if it went away), and its budget readout makes session
health visible in the log.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The endurance test refuted the sliding-window model I committed earlier.
A keepalive doing only GET /api/v3/me succeeded at t+0/30/60/90 and was
still rejected by t+120 — consistent with the session ending ~2h after
LOGIN (t+107), and inconsistent with 2h after the last request, which
would have been t+210.
This is a live-vs-source divergence, not a misreading: both the current
JwtWhitelistAdapter and the legacy Feathers ensureTokenIsWhitelisted
re-set the Valkey TTL on every authenticated request, so the source
reads as a sliding window. The instance does not behave that way.
So the keepalive now calls POST /authentication/refresh-session, the
endpoint behind the UI's "Sitzung verlängern" button, which a separate
100s test showed does hold the reported budget at 7200s. It is the only
non-GET request in the server: no body, touches only our own session,
cannot read or modify user data, and is not exposed as a tool, so no
model-driven call can ever be a POST. It logs the returned budget, which
makes a failing extension visible before the session is lost.
Whether this is sufficient is NOT established. Two mechanisms still fit:
an idle TTL that reads fail to refresh (keepalive works), or an absolute
cap/revocation anchored at login — e.g. the IDP's back-channel logout,
which clears every token for the account rather than one. Added
scripts/session-diagnose.mjs to settle it: it logs the budget every 10
min, so a decaying series indicates the former and an abrupt 401 at
7200s the latter. Docs state the open question rather than asserting a
mechanism.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The JWT's exp claim says 30 days, and I took that as the session
lifetime. It is only an outer ceiling. The server also keeps a per-token
whitelist entry in Valkey (jwt:{accountId}:{jti}) whose TTL is
JWT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS — 7200s on this instance — and JwtStrategy.validate
re-sets it on every authenticated request. Two hours idle and the token
is rejected with 29 days still on exp.
Proven, not inferred: the token from yesterday returned 401 at 13.8h old.
The live instance publishes the values unauthenticated at
GET /api/v3/config/public — JWT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS 7200,
JWT_SHOW_TIMEOUT_WARNING_SECONDS 3600, the latter being exactly the
one-hour UI prompt that prompted this investigation.
refresh-session turns out not to be special: it extends through the same
guard as any other route, and uniquely only in returning the remaining
TTL. So the keepalive uses GET /api/v3/me instead, and the server stays
GET-only; the one POST in the repo is in scripts/probe.mjs, where it
reports the idle budget.
JWT_EXTENDED_TIMEOUT_SECONDS (~1 month) exists in the config schema but
is vestigial: privateDevice has no references in the current NestJS
source, and generateJwtAndAddToWhitelist never overrides the TTL.
Also fixes a real breakage this surfaced: TypeScript parameter
properties are rejected by Node's type stripping, so `npm run dev` and
`npm test` both failed on any file reaching them. Rewritten as explicit
fields, and noted in CLAUDE.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Read-only MCP server exposing a Schulcloud account to Claude: courses,
column boards, lessons, tasks, and file downloads with text extraction.
The API surface was verified against the live instance rather than
inferred from upstream source, which changed several design decisions:
- The `jwt` cookie works verbatim as `Authorization: Bearer` and lasts 30
days, so there is no cookie jar and no refresh-session timer.
- Course contents live at /api/v3/course-rooms/{courseId}/board; there is
no GET /api/v3/courses/{id}.
- Files are a separate service (/api/v3/file/*) with its own OpenAPI doc.
- Board file elements carry no file id; attachments are resolved by
listing files-storage with parentType=boardnodes and the element id.
Read-only by construction: every client method is a GET, including the
api_get escape hatch. The endpoint is internet-facing by necessity, so a
leaked token being unable to act as the user is the key safety property.
Deploys as a container behind the Pi's existing Caddy, guarded by a
constant-time bearer check. Stateless — no database.
Verified: 28 unit tests, plus a 30-check end-to-end run driving a real
MCP client over Streamable HTTP against the live account.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
