deepseek-harness/packages/session-persistence

@deepseek-ai/dsh-session-persistence

The abstract durable session-persistence seam (ctx.sessionPersistence). Defines WHAT a persistence backend does — durably store, reload, and list sessions — without saying HOW. Mirrors the dsh-bash capability-seam template (capability seams): an abstract service here, a concrete implementation in a sibling package, consumers that inject the interface.

The persisted unit IS the existing SessionEvent (event-sourced model — the log is the single source of truth), so there is no parallel "persisted message" type. Metadata that is NOT replayable conversation state (format version, cwd, lineage) travels separately as SessionHeader, owned by dsh-session and re-exported here.

Service API (ctx.sessionPersistence)

Method	Contract
create(meta): Promise<void>	Register a new session's metadata. MAY defer the physical write until the first append (lazy materialization).
append(id, events): Promise<void>	Durably persist a batch (from the session/flush drain). Append-only; first event seq == stored next-seq after any repair; rejects non-JSON-serializable data naming the offending type.
load(id): Promise<{ meta; events }>	Reload meta + log. Preserves an interrupted (unclosed) final turn and closes it with synthetic closers — an error tool/result per unanswered tool-call, then step/end?+turn/end {interrupted} (a turn can be huge — never truncated); only a torn tail fragment is dropped. Events contiguous (events[i].seq === i); rejects a committed-region gap/parse error or unknown version.
list(): Promise<SessionHeader[]>	Lightweight listing from metadata, no full-log parse.
has(id) / delete(id)	Existence / removal. A zero-event lazily-materialized session is absent from has/list.

Invariants every backend must honor

• Append-only; a crashed turn is closed, not truncated. Committed events (at or below a flushed turn/end) are never rewritten. A crash can leave an unclosed final turn whose events are real and possibly large; load preserves them and durably appends synthetic closers (an error tool/result per unanswered tool-call, then step/end?+turn/end {interrupted}) to balance the log and keep the rehydrated history a valid provider transcript. Only a never-fully-written torn tail fragment is discarded.
• Contiguous seq. load rejects a seq gap/parse error in the MIDDLE of the log; append's first seq must equal the stored next-seq.
• JSON-serializable data. append rejects non-serializable event.data; backends snapshot each event when buffering (the live session.events object is mutable).
• Durability. append returns only once the batch is durable.

The write coordinator

The two first-party backends were byte-identical (or same-algorithm) for ALL of their write-path orchestration — the in-memory bookkeeping (per-id state, write-behind buffers, per-id serialization chains, per-session init promises), the session/event → buffer → session/flush drain, lazy materialization, crash-tail repair on load, the four session/created adoption cases (new / HMR-adopt / collision / ownerless-claim), and dispose-time quiescence. Only the STORAGE primitives differed (write bytes vs. INSERT rows).

PersistenceCoordinator owns that orchestration once. A first-party backend composes one (new PersistenceCoordinator(ctx, this)), implements the small PersistenceBackend hook interface, and delegates its six public service methods to the coordinator. This keeps the duplicated, correctness-heavy orchestration in a single place (it used to receive the same fixes twice).

The PersistenceBackend<TornMarker> hooks (the only seam between the coordinator and storage):

Hook	Role
name	Backend label for the dispose-failure AggregateError.
loadStored(id)	Read a stored prefix by id, scanning ANY storage scope. Used by resume/load and, via !== undefined, the create-collision probe. Returns an opaque tornMarker iff a torn tail must be truncated.
loadLive(id, cwd)	Read a stored prefix SCOPED to cwd (HMR live-adoption must only adopt a log at the SAME cwd; a same-id log elsewhere is a collision, not a resume). A globally-unique-id backend ignores cwd.
appendBatch(meta, events, isMaterialized)	Durably append a contiguous batch, lazily materializing ATOMICALLY when not yet materialized.
commitRepair(meta, tornMarker, closers)	Make a crash repair durable: truncate the torn tail (iff tornMarker !== undefined — a marker may be falsy, e.g. seq/offset 0) and append closers. NOT required to be atomic. Used by load (truncate + closers) and live-adoption (truncate only).
deleteStored(id) / list()	Remove a stored artifact / list all stored metadata.
close?()	Optional lifecycle teardown (e.g. close a db handle), awaited after the dispose drain.

The tornMarker is fully OPAQUE: the coordinator only tests !== undefined and round-trips it to commitRepair, never inspecting its value (the JSONL backend uses the byte offset to truncate to, the SQLite backend the seq to delete from). The public SessionPersistence service shape is unchanged, so a third-party backend MAY still implement the abstract service directly without the coordinator. See the write-coordinator RFC.

Testing backends

Import runPersistenceContract from tests/contract.ts (the public-API contract) and runCoordinatorContract from tests/coordinator-contract.ts (the shared write-path orchestration: adoption, HMR, collision, dispose-drain, crash-tail repair) and call each with a fixture for your backend. Every backend is held to the same append-only / contiguous-seq / lazy-materialization / serializability semantics AND the same orchestration, so a backend's own spec is left with only storage-mechanics tests (path sanitization, fsync rollback; schema version, transaction rollback) on top.

Three backends run these suites: an in-memory reference (in tests/), dsh-session-persistence-jsonl (append-only file log) and dsh-session-persistence-sqlite (node:sqlite, each SessionEvent one row (session_id, seq, type, time, data)). All passing the same contract + coordinator suite is the proof that the seam is genuinely backend-agnostic — lazy materialization, crash-tail-on-load, and contiguous-seq hold identically over file bytes and over a transactional store.

Metadata types

Re-exported from dsh-session: SessionHeader (immutable session metadata: version, id, createdAt, cwd?, parentSession?).