Everything stays UTC: ingest still records Unix nanoseconds, ClickHouse
still stores UTC, every API response is still RFC3339 with a Z, and
queries are evaluated exactly as before. This changes only how those
instants are written on screen, so two people in two timezones looking
at one log line see the same instant written two ways -- never two
different lines, and never a different sort order.
Where the preference lives differs by deployment, and the three cases
are genuinely different products rather than one with fallbacks:
- Local login: server-side per named user (display_timezone on users,
PUT /auth/timezone), so it follows the person across browsers and
survives logout. Self-service at the RoleViewer floor, same as the
password change -- a viewer is the role most likely to be *only*
reading logs, so gating it higher would make it useless.
- Public demo: sessionStorage, so every new session starts at UTC. A
shared account's visitors have nothing to do with each other.
- Neither: localStorage, since there's no per-user record to write to.
api/cmd/api/main.go now imports time/tzdata. The image is
distroless/static with no /usr/share/zoneinfo, so LoadLocation would
otherwise reject every real zone name and the validation would refuse
every valid input.
Two details worth knowing when reading $lib/time.ts. Sub-second digits
are copied verbatim from the source string rather than round-tripped
through a JS Date, which is millisecond-precision and would silently
drop six digits of a ClickHouse nanosecond timestamp; expanding a result
row shows the localized value and the full-precision UTC original
together. And chart axes format their own labels, because ECharts'
type: 'time' axis renders in the browser's zone with no override --
which today puts a chart's clock out of step with the table beside it.
Timestamps are detected by value, not by column name: query output is
arbitrary, so a column called "timestamp" holding something else must
not be mangled, and `stats max(timestamp) as newest` must still be
formatted.
Verified against real zones including both sides of a DST boundary
(America/New_York at -05:00 in January, -04:00 in July), a half-hour
offset, and date rollover.
web
SvelteKit frontend. Phase 0: one page, one query box, one table. No auth,
no styling polish, no routing beyond /.
What it does
Textarea for a raw SQL string → POST {VITE_API_BASE_URL}/query on /api
→ renders {columns, rows} as an HTML table, or shows {error} from a
rejected/failed query. That's the whole app — see src/routes/+page.svelte.
Why a static build, not a Node server
Scaffolded with @sveltejs/adapter-static: this page has no server-side
data loading (all data comes from a client-side fetch triggered by the
submit button), so there's nothing here that needs a running SvelteKit
server. A prerendered static site is simpler to build, deploy, and reason
about than running Node in production for a page that's this thin.
Because it's static, VITE_API_BASE_URL is baked in at build time, not
read at container start. Set it before npm run build (or pass
--build-arg VITE_API_BASE_URL=... to docker build) — changing it later
means rebuilding, not just restarting the container.
Timestamps and the display timezone
Everything in Cairn OBS is UTC: ingest records Unix nanoseconds,
ClickHouse stores UTC, and every API response is RFC3339 with a Z. The
web UI renders those instants in whichever zone the reader picked
(Settings → Display timezone), which changes presentation only --
never which rows a query returns, never their order, and never what
earliest=/latest= mean. Two people in two zones looking at one log
line see the same instant written two ways.
src/lib/time.ts-- pure formatting.formatTimestampis the one entry point; it detects timestamps by value, not by column name, since query output is arbitrary. Sub-second digits are copied verbatim from the source string rather than round-tripped through a JSDate, which is millisecond-precision and would silently drop the last six digits of a ClickHouse nanosecond timestamp.src/lib/timezone.svelte.ts-- where the choice is stored, which differs by deployment on purpose: per named user server-side when local login is on (PUT /auth/timezone, so it follows a person across browsers), per browser session on a public demo (a shared account's visitors shouldn't inherit each other's settings), per browser otherwise.- Charts format their own axis and tooltip labels through the same
helper. ECharts'
type: 'time'axis otherwise renders in the browser's zone with no way to override it, which would put a chart's clock out of step with the table beside it.
The one place the UTC baseline is still visible to a user is query input:
earliest=/latest= are parsed as UTC regardless of this setting. The
Settings page says so explicitly rather than leaving it to be discovered.
Building & running
npm install
cp .env.example .env # adjust VITE_API_BASE_URL if /api isn't on localhost:8080
npm run dev # local dev server with hot reload
npm run check # svelte-check, type errors
npm run build # static output to build/
npm run preview # serve the static build locally to sanity-check it
docker build -f Dockerfile -t cairnobs-web . # context is web/, not the repo root
docker run -p 3000:3000 cairnobs-web
Tenant picker (Phase 4)
src/routes/select-tenant is the one route that isn't reachable by
clicking around the app -- enterprise-auth's internal/loginhandler
redirects a browser here after an SSO login resolves to more than one
tenant_memberships row (see that package's doc comment), carrying a
short-lived cairnobs_pending_login cookie instead of a real session. The
page calls GET /auth/memberships to list the choices, and
POST /auth/select-tenant on a click, both via
fetch(..., {credentials: 'include'}) ($lib/api.ts's
listMemberships/selectTenant) so that cookie -- and, on success, the
real session cookie the POST response sets -- actually cross the origin
boundary between this app and enterprise-auth. enterprise-auth's
default POST_LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL (this app's own base URL) is also
where CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGIN defaults to, and it has to be a literal
origin, not * -- see api/httpserver.WithCredentialedCORS's doc
comment for why a credentialed fetch and a wildcard CORS origin can
never be combined; getAuthFeatures above deliberately doesn't send
credentials for exactly this reason, and is why it could stay on the
plain WithCORS every other endpoint in this repo uses.
Like every other route (export const prerender = true in this route's
own +page.ts), no server-side data loading -- the membership list and
the tenant choice both come from client-side fetch calls the same way
the root query page's does.
Verified in a real browser in this environment: a throwaway Node server
standing in for enterprise-auth (implementing the exact
GET /auth/memberships/POST /auth/select-tenant wire contract,
including the plain-text http.Error bodies the real handler sends, not
JSON) on a different origin/port than this app's dev server, driven
through the full flow -- cross-origin pending-login cookie set, the
credentialed preflight + GET/POST round trip, a real click choosing
a tenant, and the post-selection redirect landing back on / -- plus
the missing/expired-cookie error path separately. No Docker or live
Postgres/IdP needed for this, since the whole point was exercising this
app's own fetch/CORS/cookie wiring against a contract-accurate fake, not
enterprise-auth's internals (those are enterprise/internal/ loginhandler's own tests' job, already covered there).
Why nginx, not distroless
The repo convention prefers distroless/scratch base images. Serving a
static SPA still needs some HTTP server, though, and nginx:alpine is
the boring, standard choice for that job — writing a custom static-file
binary just to stay distroless would be more engineering than a Phase 0
placeholder page justifies. nginx.conf here is minimal: serve build/,
fall back to index.html for client-side routing (only one route exists
today, but this is what you want the moment a second one is added).