Integration-kit/book/03-sidecar.md

# 3. The sidecar

Your module may not open a connection to a game server. Not a game socket, not an
RCON channel, not a query port, not an engine's admin API. It talks to a
**sidecar**, and the sidecar talks to the game.

That is a rule in the contract ([`MODULE_API.md`][api] §2.7, as of
`MODULE_API_VERSION` 1.4.0) rather than advice this kit is offering. It is also
the rule most likely to feel like ceremony when your game already exposes a
perfectly good remote-control protocol and your module is fifty lines from
working. This chapter is why it is not.

**It is the one rule in that list with no CI behind it.** An outbound socket is
not statically detectable the way an internal `require` is. So it is enforced by
review, and by you having read this.

---

## What a sidecar is

A small, separate service that owns the connection to your game, keeps a durable
copy of what the game said, and exposes an HTTP + WebSocket API that the website's
backend reads.

```
   your game server  ──dials out──▶  your sidecar  ──HTTP + WS──▶  website core
                                          │                          (your module)
                                          ▼
                                    its own store
```

Three properties, and each is doing real work.

## 1. The game dials out; the sidecar listens

The sidecar binds the listener. The game connects **to it**, and the game opens no
listening port at all.

This is the inversion people find surprising and it is the load-bearing one. The
website is the internet-facing process; your game is not, and must not become
reachable because a web app knows how to reach it. A module holding the connection
makes the public web app the thing the game trusts, and puts the game's address
inside the same process as every request from the internet.

In `uo-link`, that listener is `sidecar/src/shard.rs` — `serve` binds a loopback
address and accepts shard connections forever, handling one at a time and looping
back to accept the next. The game plugin does the dialling, with its own backoff.
Loopback, in that deployment, because the sidecar runs on the game host: the only
socket the game speaks over never leaves the machine.

Only the website's backend talks to the sidecar, and it authenticates. `uo-link`'s
`web.rs` requires a token on every request — accepted as a bearer header, an API-key
header, or a query parameter, that last one only because browser WebSocket clients
cannot set handshake headers — and compares it in constant time. Auth is always on;
there is no unauthenticated mode to accidentally deploy.

## 2. Persist before you forward

This is the property that makes a sidecar worth having even when your game is
already remote-controllable, and the one a message-passing diagram never conveys.

**The sidecar owns the durable copy.** It writes what the game said into its own
store, and answers reads from that store — not by round-tripping the game.

`uo-link` does this in `sidecar/src/store.rs`: SQLite, holding event history, the
latest snapshot of every board the site renders, the economy series and the
published ruleset. `insert_event` is called for every live event as it is
broadcast; the `upsert_*` functions keep one current row per board; the REST read
paths query that store.

What it buys, concretely:

- **A website that is down, restarting or mid-deploy loses nothing.** Events that
  arrive while nothing is listening are still recorded. Without a store they are
  simply gone, and your first deploy of the week is a hole in your data.
- **A page renders the last thing the game said rather than going blank.** A rules
  page that empties itself because the game restarted is worse than a stale one.
- **The live feed is allowed to be lossy.** `uo-link`'s WebSocket fan-out drops
  frames for a consumer that has fallen behind and logs that it did — deliberately,
  because durability is the store's job and not the socket's. A feed that instead
  buffered without limit for a slow client would eventually take the sidecar down.

That last point is the reasoning to carry into your own design. Once the store is
authoritative, every other component is allowed to be best-effort, and each of them
gets simpler. Skip the store and you find yourself trying to make a socket reliable,
which is the hard version of this problem.

A module cannot do any of this from inside the website process. There is nowhere to
put what arrives while the website is not running, because the website not running
is exactly the case.

## 3. The wire is a versioned contract, not a build dependency

Your sidecar and your module ship separately, on different schedules, to hosts you
do not control. So the wire between them is a compatibility contract with a version
on it.

`uo-link` declares `PROTOCOL_VERSION` in `sidecar/src/main.rs`, stamps
`X-UOLink-Version` onto every response from `web.rs`, and **refuses a request whose
declared version does not match** rather than parsing it optimistically. A refusal
is a clear failure an operator can act on; a mis-parse is a wrong number on a page
with nobody to tell.

Two habits come with that:

- **Bump the version in the same change that changes a message shape**, on every
  side that declares it. In this project a protocol bump has three declaration
  sites — the sidecar, the game-side overlay's manifest, and the documented spec —
  and the tooling refuses to pair components that disagree.
- **Version the *shape*, not the content.** Adding a new event kind that old
  consumers ignore is not a break. Changing what a field means is, even when the
  JSON still parses.

## The worked example

`uo-link` is a complete implementation of everything above, and it is small enough
to read:

| File | What it owns |
| --- | --- |
| `sidecar/src/shard.rs` | The listener the game dials into; one connection at a time, then accept the next. |
| `sidecar/src/store.rs` | SQLite: event history, per-board snapshots, the series and the ruleset. |
| `sidecar/src/web.rs` | HTTP + WebSocket for the website, the auth middleware, the version header and the lossy live fan-out. |
| `sidecar/src/rpc.rs` | Request/reply correlation, so a website read can ask the game a question and match the answer. |
| `sidecar/src/config.rs` | The config file, including a token generated on first run rather than defaulted. |

The protocol it speaks is specified in [`link/PLAN.md`][linkplan] and
[`link/INTEGRATION.md`][linkint]. Those are normative for that sidecar; your game
is not Ultima Online and your messages will not be its messages. What transfers is
the structure — a listener the game dials into, a store written before anything is
forwarded, a lossy live feed, an authenticated read API with a version on it.

## "But my game already speaks a remote-control protocol"

Then your sidecar is **thin**, not absent — and be sure the surface you are
thinking of actually carries what your module needs, because that is where this
question usually goes wrong.

A remote-control channel is built for an operator typing commands: it tells you
what you asked about, when you ask. What a website needs is what *happened* —
every kill, every join, every departure, delivered whether or not anyone was
listening at that moment. Those are different products, and a channel that
answers the first can only approximate the second by polling it, which turns
"someone left the clan at 14:02" into "the count was different at 14:03".

So the honest test is not *does my game expose a protocol* but **does it deliver
events**. If it does, your sidecar keeps that connection, its credentials and its
reconnect loop out of an Express process, keeps a store so the site is not blank
whenever the game restarts, and presents your module one versioned HTTP + WS
shape. That is what thin means: less code, the same architecture.

**Rust is the worked example, and it is not that case.** The dry run in
[`rust-dryrun.md`][dryrun] designs a module for it precisely because it shares so
little with Ultima Online — and its answer is a **mod**: a plugin loaded by the
server's own mod framework, hooking the game's events and dialling out to a
sidecar, exactly as the ServUO overlay does. The Rust server is a *binary*, where
ServUO is source a shard owner compiles, so the way in is a published hook API
rather than a file you edit. **The three-part shape survives that unchanged**,
which is the more useful finding: the plugin-dials-out arrangement is not a
property of having source access.

That document reached the game over RCON until 2026-08-19, and before that
concluded there should be **no sidecar at all**. It carries both corrections,
dated, rather than having been quietly rewritten — the value of a dry run is the
record of what it found, including where it was overruled.

## Building yours

There is no template for a sidecar in this kit; it is your program, in your
language, and the surface it must expose is the surface your module reads. What to
settle before writing code:

1. **Which direction does the connection go?** The game dials out. If your game
   cannot — if it only accepts connections — then your sidecar is the client to the
   game and the listener for the website, and the rule that stands is the one that
   matters: the address of the game is known to the sidecar and to nothing else.
2. **What is durable?** Everything a page must still render when the game is down.
   Write it before you forward it.
3. **What is a snapshot and what is an event?** They are different storage
   problems: an event is appended and read back as history, a board is one current
   row per subject that you overwrite. `uo-link`'s store holds both, and keeping
   them separate is why a restart does not replay a year of events at a page.
4. **What is the version, and where is it declared?** One place, on every response,
   refused on mismatch.
5. **How does the website authenticate?** A token, generated rather than defaulted,
   always required.

Then chapter 4, if your game needs code inside it — which is the part where getting
it wrong takes the game down rather than the website.

[api]: https://gitea.whitlocktech.com/RunicGateway/docs/src/branch/main/website/MODULE_API.md
[linkplan]: https://gitea.whitlocktech.com/RunicGateway/docs/src/branch/main/link/PLAN.md
[linkint]: https://gitea.whitlocktech.com/RunicGateway/docs/src/branch/main/link/INTEGRATION.md
[dryrun]: https://gitea.whitlocktech.com/RunicGateway/docs/src/branch/main/modules/rust-dryrun.md