orca/cloud

Orca Relay

The relay that connects the Orca mobile app to a desktop host. Phones and desktops never talk to each other directly: each opens an outbound WebSocket to a relay cell, the relay pairs the two sessions, and it splices frames between them. A director assigns hosts to cells and coordinates migrations; cells carry the user connections.

This directory is an independent pnpm workspace inside the Orca monorepo. Run its commands from cloud/, not the repository root. The source is covered by the repository's root MIT license.

The 2026-10-21 security review records dependency/container scans, remaining upstream advisories, CI coverage, and the validation required before rolling out the updated images and host pins.

Packages

• packages/relay-contract: the wire contract shared by the relay, the desktop app, and the mobile app (frame shapes, close codes, admission budgets, splice state machine).
• apps/relay: the relay server. The same image runs as a director or a cell depending on ORCA_RELAY_ROLE.
• apps/relay-fence-broker: a private, IAM-only service that owns the durable mutation lease, the Terraform checkout, and the narrow Compute mutation used when a registered target is superseded. The workflow that calls it holds read and invoke rights only, never those mutation permissions.
• apps/push and packages/push-contract: the mobile push gateway that holds the APNs key and sends to phones through APNs and FCM, and its wire contract. Deployment and operations are owned by the private stablyai/orca-cloud repository.

Mobile push gateway

apps/push is a separate Cloud Run service from the relay. Phones never hold an Orca credential for it: the desktop host authenticates with the same X25519 key it uses for the relay, answering an encrypted challenge to mint a 24 hour session, then registers each paired phone's native push token and asks the gateway to push. The gateway queues each event as its own notification, enforces per-host quotas and request limits, and retires a registration as soon as Apple or Google reports the token unregistered. Provider push is the only ordinary mobile OS-banner path. The notification socket is retained only for live dismissal and reconnect tray reconciliation; it never creates or recovers banners. Desktop notification categories remain authoritative. Each delivery is persisted as one notification event. Before deploying an incompatible queue format, stop all older push gateway revisions and clear only unpublished push delivery fixtures; no queue preservation or migration is required. FCM notification messages are inherently collapsible while offline and have a small concurrent collapse-key budget, so every pending alert is not guaranteed.

Storage follows the relay pattern: PostgreSQL in production, SQLite for tests and local development. Configure it with ORCA_PUSH_PUBLIC_URL, ORCA_PUSH_FCM_PROJECT_ID, ORCA_PUSH_DATABASE_URL, the three APNs variables (ORCA_PUSH_APNS_KEY, ORCA_PUSH_APNS_KEY_ID, ORCA_PUSH_APPLE_TEAM_ID, all three or none), and optionally ORCA_PUSH_APNS_TOPIC. The FCM credential comes from the runtime service account, so no key material is configured for Android. See push gateway operations for deployment and recovery.

Logging is aggregate counters only. Tokens, notification titles, notification bodies, and full host fingerprints never reach a log line.

Deployment configuration

The relay runtime and wire contracts are public. Production and staging Terraform, backend configuration, operator tools, runbooks, broker image assembly, and deployment workflows live in the private stablyai/orca-cloud repository. That repository pins an immutable public source revision and combines it with its deployment configuration.

Cloud Verify here builds and tests public runtime code, audits dependencies, scans relay and push images, and checks for secrets without cloud credentials. Private CI also validates Terraform, scans the SQL proxy and broker, and runs deployment contracts.

Local development

cd cloud
pnpm install
pnpm build
pnpm test

pnpm test runs the SQLite-backed suites. Tests that need PostgreSQL run only when ORCA_RELAY_TEST_POSTGRES_URL points at a disposable PostgreSQL 16 or 17 database, for example:

docker run --rm -d --name orca-relay-pg -e POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=orca_relay_test -p 55440:5432 postgres:16-alpine
ORCA_RELAY_TEST_POSTGRES_URL=postgres://postgres@127.0.0.1:55440/orca_relay_test \
  pnpm --filter @orca-cloud/relay test
docker rm -f orca-relay-pg

Configuration is read from environment variables validated in apps/relay/src/config.ts. ORCA_RELAY_ASSIGNMENT_SIGNING_KEY (at least 32 bytes) is the only required value; everything else has a local default.