interactive-story/DEVELOPMENT.md

Development and local operation

This is the Adventure Storyteller production fork of AI-DnD. PROVENANCE.md records where the code came from; planning/ holds the product specification and milestone plan.

Everything here assumes the local-only rule from planning/DECISIONS/004-local-only-production.md: after setup, ordinary story play must work with no Internet access at all. Setup itself downloads dependencies and models; playing does not.

Versions this was built and tested on

OS	Linux (Ubuntu 24.04 userland), x86-64, 4 cores, 15 GB RAM, no GPU
Python	3.12.3
Node	22.23.1, npm 10.9.8 (the Dockerfile builds the SPA on Node 24)
Ollama	ollama/ollama:latest in Docker
Models	qwen2.5:3b-instruct (narrator), nomic-embed-text (memory bank)

Setup

# Backend, from the exact tested dependency closure.
python3 -m venv backend/.venv
backend/.venv/bin/pip install -r backend/requirements.lock

# Frontend.
cd frontend && npm ci && cd ..

backend/requirements.lock pins every version, transitive ones included. backend/requirements.txt states the ranges the code actually needs and stays the file you edit; regenerate the lock after a deliberate upgrade (the header in the lock says how).

This is the only step that needs the Internet. It downloads Python and npm packages; it does not download a tokenizer or a font, because both are vendored in the tree — see "What was made offline-safe" below.

You also need the models, once:

ollama pull qwen2.5:3b-instruct
ollama pull nomic-embed-text      # only if you want the memory bank

There is no account to create and nothing to log in to. The application is single-user: whoever can reach it on loopback is its owner.

Running

Development — backend on :8000, Vite dev server on :5173:

./start.sh

Production-shaped — one server, SPA served by FastAPI:

cd frontend && npm run build && cd ..
cd backend && .venv/bin/uvicorn app.main:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Docker:

docker compose up --build

The listener is loopback, and stays loopback

start.sh, start.ps1 and the production command above all pass --host 127.0.0.1 explicitly. docker-compose.yml publishes 127.0.0.1:8000:8000 — the process inside the container listens on 0.0.0.0 because a published port cannot reach anything else, but the port is only bound on the host's loopback.

That is a requirement, not a preference. In local mode the storyteller API is single-user and unauthenticated: anything that can reach it can read and rewrite every campaign. Putting Ollama on another machine (below) does not change this — it is an outbound connection and needs no inbound exposure.

If you publish the port to 0.0.0.0 anyway, you have made a deliberate decision that this project's threat model does not cover (planning/SECURITY-THREAT-MODEL.md).

Pointing the storyteller at Ollama

The endpoint, model and (unused) API key are runtime settings stored in the database, not environment variables. Set them on the app's Settings page, or with one request:

curl -X PUT http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/settings \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"endpoint_url":"http://127.0.0.1:11434/v1","model":"qwen2.5:3b-instruct",
       "api_mode":"chat","api_key":"","max_output_tokens":200,
       "context_token_budget":4096}'

POST /api/settings/test (the Test connection button) returns {"ok": true, "models": [...]} and is the fastest way to tell a wrong endpoint from a missing model. When it fails it says which kind of failure it was, and they need different things done about them:

kind	What it means
rejected	The endpoint is outside the policy below. Not a network problem.
unreachable	Nothing answered. Ollama is not running there, or the port is wrong.
tls	The certificate did not verify — install the CA (see below).
timeout	It accepted the connection and then said nothing.
http	It answered with an error status; the body is included.

A successful test also warns when the endpoint is reachable but has no model by the configured name, which is the commonest way for a correct endpoint to still fail every turn.

Which endpoints are allowed

backend/app/endpoints.py decides, and it is deliberately narrow: loopback, your own LAN, or nothing. The allowed networks are 127.0.0.0/8, the three RFC1918 ranges, link-local, IPv6 loopback and unique-local, and 100.64.0.0/10 (carrier-grade NAT, which is what a mesh VPN such as Tailscale hands out).

Every address the endpoint's hostname resolves to must be in one of them. A public address is refused, a name resolving to both a private and a public address is refused, and known cloud inference hosts are refused by name so the error says why rather than looking like a DNS fault.

The rule is applied when you save the endpoint and again before every outbound request, so a database edited by hand or a hostname that starts resolving somewhere new cannot turn a local install into an exfiltration path. There is no setting to relax it.

Same host (the default)

endpoint_url = http://127.0.0.1:11434/v1

Nothing else to do. Ollama's own default is to listen on loopback.

An Ollama on another machine on your trusted LAN

Supported and explicitly configured — never guessed, never discovered.

On the inference machine, tell Ollama to accept connections from the LAN, because it binds loopback by default:

OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0:11434 ollama serve

On the storyteller machine, set the endpoint to that host's address:

endpoint_url = http://192.168.1.50:11434/v1

Use an IP address or a name your own network resolves. Then:

• the storyteller UI/API stays on 127.0.0.1 — do not change the listener;
• prompts, story text, retrieved memories and embedding inputs all travel to that host, so it has to be one you control, on a network you trust;
• the inference machine needs the models installed, not the storyteller;
• no Internet is involved in either direction.

A LAN endpoint is accepted because it is on one of the allowed networks above. Nothing else about it is special.

If that endpoint is HTTPS with your own CA

Some inference hosts are only reachable over TLS. A StartOS server is one: it serves Ollama over HTTPS with a certificate from its own local CA, and plain HTTP redirects to it.

Install that CA on the machine running the storyteller, the same way you would for the browser — on Debian and Ubuntu:

sudo cp your-ca.crt /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/
sudo update-ca-certificates

then use the https:// URL and the hostname the certificate is issued for:

endpoint_url = https://inference.lan:8443/v1

The application verifies against the machine's CA store and the certifi bundle (backend/app/tlstrust.py), so a CA you installed at the OS level is honoured, exactly as curl and your browser honour it. Public certificates keep working unchanged.

There is deliberately no setting to skip verification. If a connection is refused with CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED, the CA is not installed where the storyteller can see it, or the URL's hostname does not match the certificate — openssl s_client -connect host:port will say which. In a container, remember the CA has to be inside the image or bind-mounted; the host's store is not visible from within.

Tests

cd backend && .venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ -q     # 638 tests
cd frontend && npm run lint && npm run build

Two files are the M1 regression guards.

test_offline_assets.py fails if the tokenizer starts fetching its table again, if a remote font or stylesheet comes back, or if the CSP names a remote origin. Two of its checks read the built SPA under frontend/dist/ and skip when it has not been built, so run npm run build before treating a green suite as complete evidence.

test_tls_trust.py fails if outbound verification is weakened, if a public CA is lost from the union, or if a new HTTP client is added without the shared verification context.

M2 added two more. test_endpoint_policy.py fails if the set of reachable addresses widens, or if either place the rule is applied stops applying it — it resolves hostnames through a stub, so it tests the policy rather than whatever DNS the machine has. test_local_only_surface.py fails if a removed subsystem comes back as a route, if an API key becomes settable again, if the model timeout stops being configurable or becomes unbounded, or if a supported start path stops binding loopback.

What was made offline-safe, and how to check

Two runtime downloads were removed in Milestone M1. Both were invisible on a machine that had been online once, which is exactly why they need tests.

The tokenizer. tiktoken.get_encoding("cl100k_base") downloads a 1.7 MB BPE table on first use, and the context builder counts tokens on every turn, so the first story turn on an air-gapped install died with a ConnectionError. The table is vendored at backend/app/context/vendor/cl100k_base.tiktoken and backend/app/context/encoding.py builds the encoding from it, verifying its SHA-256 against the digest tiktoken itself pins.

The fonts. The SPA linked fonts.googleapis.com from index.html, so every page load fetched a stylesheet and font files from Google. The three families are self-hosted under frontend/public/fonts/, declared in frontend/src/styles/fonts.css, and re-vendored by python3 frontend/tools/vendor_fonts.py. The CSP in backend/app/main.py now names no remote origin at all.

To convince yourself on a machine that has already been online, run the app with no route out rather than trusting a cold cache:

docker network create --internal offline
docker run -d --name ollama --network offline -v ollama-models:/root/.ollama ollama/ollama
docker build -t storyteller .
# The app shares Ollama's network namespace, so Ollama is on its loopback and
# neither has a route to the Internet.
docker run -d --name app --network container:ollama -v story-data:/data \
  storyteller uvicorn app.main:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000
docker exec app python -c "import socket; socket.create_connection(('1.1.1.1',443),timeout=4)"
# -> OSError: Network is unreachable, and story turns still work

planning/archive/milestone-reports/M1-BASELINE-REPORT.md records the run this procedure is taken from, including the packet captures.

Things still inherited from upstream

M2 removed the hosted, cloud, account, analytics, Postgres/Render and QuickJS scripting surfaces outright — PROVENANCE.md lists exactly what went. What is left of upstream that a newcomer might report as a defect:

• Inert legacy tables and columns. Five tables and four columns M2 emptied of meaning are still in the schema, unmapped, so an M1-era campaign database opens unchanged. Nothing reads or writes them. A cleanup migration waits for the schema to settle after M5 (planning/BUILD-MILESTONES.md).
• Dual-dialect migration code. backend/app/migrations.py still carries SQLite/Postgres branches from upstream, although Postgres support itself is gone and SQLite is the only store. Same cleanup, same milestone.
• .github/workflows/ci.yml is upstream's GitHub Actions pipeline. This repository lives on a self-hosted Gitea; the workflow is kept for provenance and is not what runs the tests here.
• No frontend tests. npm run lint && npm run build is the whole frontend check. A test runner is M8's job.