The guide walked a developer from manifest to install but never told them how to validate the manifest locally first — despite scripts/validate-app-manifest.sh existing for exactly that. A developer's first signal that their manifest was wrong would have been an install failure on a node. Adds a "Validate Your Manifest" step at the top of Testing, pointing at the script (recently fixed — it had been rejecting every manifest because it shelled out to a missing ruby). Notes the strict behaviour a new submitter hits, e.g. an unpinned :latest tag is rejected, and that the Rust parser is canonical. Verified: the install RPC example in this guide (id + dockerImage) matches the handler; the cargo test target crate name (archipelago-container) is correct. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Archipelago documentation
Start here. This index groups the docs by what you're trying to do. The
authoritative behaviour is always the code in core/; where a doc and the code
disagree, the code wins and the doc is a bug.
Getting started
- User Walkthrough — setting up and using a node, from hardware to daily use
- Talking to your node — the conversational command surface
- Seed Verification — independently verify your 24-word backup
- Troubleshooting — common problems and how to resolve them
- Gamepad / Controller Navigation — driving the UI from a controller
Architecture
- Architecture — the system at a glance
- Multi-Node Architecture — how nodes relate across a fleet
- API Reference — the JSON-RPC surface
App development
- App Developer Guide — build and package a containerized app
- App Manifest Specification — the manifest schema, field by field
- Manifest → Quadlet unit — how a manifest compiles to a systemd-owned container unit
- Container lifecycle — the reconciler state machine: install/adopt/start/stop/self-heal
- App secrets — declaring, generating and injecting per-install credentials
- Registry-Distributed Manifests — how manifests reach nodes via the signed catalog
- Decentralized Marketplace Protocol — publishing apps via an external registry
- Bitcoin RPC Relay — letting an external wallet reach the node's Bitcoin RPC
- Companion Pairing QR — the pairing handoff contract
- TV input inside iframe apps — keyboard/gamepad routing into embedded apps
Design docs
These record why a thing is built the way it is. They are design records, not step-by-step guides, and some predate the current implementation.
- Registry-Distributed Manifests
- DHT Distribution
- Bitcoin Multi-Version
- Dual Ecash
- Hardware Signer
- Manifest Hooks
- Meshroller Integration
- Nostr Git Source Hosting
- Nostr Identity Import · Nostr Signer Login (research)
- Streaming Ecash (phase 4)
- App Packaging Migration
Decisions (ADRs)
- ADR-001: Podman over Docker
- ADR-002: DID Key Method for Node Identity
- ADR-003: Nostr Relays for Discovery
- ADR-004: Tor Hidden Services for Peer Communication
- ADR-005: ChaCha20-Poly1305 for Backup Encryption
- ADR-006: Nostr Relays for Marketplace Discovery
- ADR-007: DID-Based Federation Trust
- ADR-008: Dual Key Strategy (Ed25519 + Secp256k1)
- ADR-009: Manifest-Level Container Security
- ADR-011: DWN Deprioritization
Security
- Security Policy — how to report a vulnerability
- PSBT Signing Architecture
- Bitcoin RPC Proxy Exposure
- Entropy Enforcement (KEY-05)