Policy and Metering

vibeD exposes two seams on the deploy path so operators and integrators can plug in governance and usage accounting without forking the core:

• PolicyGate — a deploy-time decision hook. It runs after the classifier picks a lane and template and before the VibedApp is created, and may reject the deploy.
• MeterSink — a usage-event hook. It records deploy/delete events from the server and app.ready/app.stopped lifecycle transitions from the controller.

Both are ordinary Go extensibility: you build your own out-of-tree module, implement the interface, register it from an init(), and start the server through server.Main() (see Building the binary). Nothing here is coupled to a specific implementation — the core ships a neutral default for each seam (no gate; a Prometheus meter).

The exported types live in package github.com/vibed-project/vibeD/pkg/plugin. pkg/plugin re-exports the internal registry interfaces as type aliases, so a type in your module that satisfies plugin.PolicyGate also satisfies the internal interface — no adapter needed.

Both seams are single-slot

There is at most one registered gate and one registered meter sink per process. RegisterPolicyGate / RegisterMeterSink panic on a second registration. Compose multiple meter sinks with TeeMeterSinks instead of registering twice.

PolicyGate

A PolicyGate evaluates every deploy — new apps and redeploys alike, since a redeploy can introduce a new violation — after classification and before anything is stored or created. Returning a denial aborts the deploy and the API responds 403 Forbidden; nothing is persisted.

There is no gate by default: a plain build registers none, so deploys are unrestricted and behavior is unchanged until you register one.

The interface

type PolicyGate interface {
    Evaluate(ctx context.Context, in PolicyInput) error
}

A non-nil return denies the deploy. To get the 403 mapping, return a *PolicyDeniedError (or any error whose PolicyDenied() bool method returns true); any other error is treated as a denial as well but is not specially typed.

// PolicyDeniedError marks a policy denial. Its Error() reads
// "deploy denied by policy: <Reason>".
type PolicyDeniedError struct {
    Reason string
}

PolicyInput

PolicyInput carries everything the classifier resolved, plus the raw source bytes:

Field	Type	Notes
Tenant	plugin.Tenant	Resolved tenant (ID, Namespace, Limits); ID is empty for the single-tenant default.
Owner	string	Deploying identity.
Name	string	App name (a DNS label).
Lane	vibedv1.Lane	Chosen lane (fast / general), after any override.
Template	string	Chosen warm-pool template, after any override.
AllowedHosts	[]string	Per-app egress allow-list; empty means no external egress.
Env	[]vibedv1.EnvVar	Environment variables for the app.
IsNew	bool	true for a first deploy, false for a redeploy under an existing name.
Source	[]byte	The uploaded source tarball (gzip'd), for content policies such as secret scanning. Read-only; do not retain it past Evaluate.

This is enough to enforce, for example: allowed templates or lanes, egress destinations, guardrails on env values, secrets-in-source scanning, or per-tenant ceilings.

Registering a gate

func RegisterPolicyGate(f func(PolicyDeps) (PolicyGate, error))

RegisterPolicyGate installs the factory (called once at startup with a PolicyDeps{Options map[string]string} settings bag). Call it from your package's init().

Skeleton

package mypolicy

import (
    "context"
    "strings"

    "github.com/vibed-project/vibeD/pkg/plugin"
)

// gate denies deploys whose source appears to embed a private key.
type gate struct{}

func (gate) Evaluate(_ context.Context, in plugin.PolicyInput) error {
    if strings.Contains(string(in.Source), "BEGIN PRIVATE KEY") {
        return &plugin.PolicyDeniedError{Reason: "source contains an embedded private key"}
    }
    return nil
}

func init() {
    plugin.RegisterPolicyGate(func(_ plugin.PolicyDeps) (plugin.PolicyGate, error) {
        return gate{}, nil
    })
}

Wire it into a custom binary by blank-importing the package so its init() runs, then starting the server:

package main

import (
    _ "example.com/mypolicy"

    "github.com/vibed-project/vibeD/pkg/server"
)

func main() { server.Main() }

Source is gzip'd

PolicyInput.Source is the raw gzip'd tarball. For byte-pattern checks you can scan it as shown; for path- or file-content policies, decompress and walk the tar entries yourself. Treat the slice as borrowed — copy anything you need to keep.

MeterSink

A MeterSink records one MeterEvent per usage event. It is best-effort and off the critical path: Record returns no error and must not block for long. Metering never fails a deploy.

The interface

type MeterSink interface {
    Record(ctx context.Context, e MeterEvent)
}

MeterEvent

type MeterEvent struct {
    Kind      string // event type; see below
    Tenant    string // tenant ID ("default" for the single-tenant default)
    Owner     string
    App       string
    Namespace string
}

Kind is one of:

Kind	Emitted by	When
deploy	server (deploy service)	A deploy succeeds and the VibedApp is created/updated.
delete	server (deploy service)	An app is deleted.
app.ready	controller	The app reaches Ready.
app.stopped	controller	The app stops.

An app.ready → app.stopped pair bounds a runtime interval, which is what you'd integrate over to account for compute usage.

The default sink

When no sink is registered, the core installs a Prometheus sink that counts events by kind and tenant:

vibed_usage_events_total{kind,tenant}

The tenant label is the tenant ID (not name) to bound cardinality; the single-tenant default reports tenant="default". This series is exposed on the standard /metrics endpoint alongside the other vibeD metrics.

Registering a sink

func RegisterMeterSink(f func(MeterDeps) (MeterSink, error))

Registering a sink replaces the Prometheus default. To keep the built-in metric while adding your own accounting, compose them (see below). Two helpers are provided:

func PrometheusMeterSink() MeterSink             // the core's default sink
func TeeMeterSinks(sinks ...MeterSink) MeterSink // fan one event out to many sinks

Skeleton

package mymeter

import (
    "context"
    "log/slog"

    "github.com/vibed-project/vibeD/pkg/plugin"
)

// sink logs every usage event as structured JSON.
type sink struct{}

func (sink) Record(_ context.Context, e plugin.MeterEvent) {
    slog.Info("usage",
        "kind", e.Kind,
        "tenant", e.Tenant,
        "owner", e.Owner,
        "app", e.App,
        "namespace", e.Namespace,
    )
}

func init() {
    plugin.RegisterMeterSink(func(_ plugin.MeterDeps) (plugin.MeterSink, error) {
        return sink{}, nil
    })
}

Composing sinks

Because registering replaces the default, tee your sink with PrometheusMeterSink() to keep the vibed_usage_events_total metric:

plugin.RegisterMeterSink(func(_ plugin.MeterDeps) (plugin.MeterSink, error) {
    return plugin.TeeMeterSinks(
        plugin.PrometheusMeterSink(), // keep the built-in metric
        sink{},                       // plus your own accounting
    ), nil
})

TeeMeterSinks fans each event out to every sink in order and skips nil entries.

Building the binary

A build that uses either seam is an ordinary Go module that depends on github.com/vibed-project/vibeD, blank-imports its provider package(s), and calls server.Main(). Build it the same way as the core:

GOTOOLCHAIN=auto GO111MODULE=on go build ./...

Package github.com/vibed-project/vibeD/pkg/server exposes the full entrypoint — server.Main(), server.Run(cfg, logger), server.LoadConfig(path), and server.NewLogger(cfg) — and pkg/plugin re-exports the other registerable seams (stores, auth providers, tenancy, secret schemes, feature-gating) the same way as the two documented here.