v0.53.0

0.53.0 - 2026-09-08

Highlights

• Less waiting for runners and coordinator requests. Use HTTP/2 where supported, close idle control connections promptly, and overlap AWS network discovery and SSH authorization while avoiding redundant access lookups.
• Recover lost run-start responses. Keep the same run identity when a coordinator admission response is lost, recovering the original record without creating another run or replaying the command.
• Safer downloads and failure evidence. Stream downloads into private temporary files, preserve existing destinations when a transfer fails, and keep failure-capture scratch files outside the tested checkout.
• Clearer cloud failures and recovery. Preserve useful GCP API error messages, including billing failures, and automatically recover Azure leases blocked by settled legacy infrastructure operations.
• Image-publication outcomes even on failure. Retain sanitized results for successful, failed, and incomplete measured AWS image publications, including partial measurements and rollback and cleanup state.

Upgrade notes

• Upgrade self-hosted coordinators before clients. Run admission now requires PUT /v1/runs/<run-id>; older coordinators cannot support the new recovery path. Updated coordinators retain the legacy POST route for older clients, and existing run IDs remain readable. PR 1970.
• Ordinary SSH downloads now enforce a 1 GiB per-file limit and retain at least 1 GiB of local free space. Failed, canceled, oversized, or size-mismatched transfers leave existing destinations unchanged. PR 1983.
• Automatic failure captures enforce a 64 MiB limit on intermediate archives and downloaded payloads. Before archive creation, both scratch and output filesystems must each have the 1 GiB reserve plus twice the capture limit available. PR 1983.
• Measured AWS image-publication manifests now use crabbox-devtools-image-proof/v2 and cover failed and incomplete outcomes. Baseline measurements are descriptive; only candidate and promoted cohorts apply the benchmark policy. PR 1986.

Changes

• Negotiate HTTP/2 for coordinator API requests while retaining HTTP/1 compatibility, apply the existing redirect guard to WebSocket upgrades, and finish control shutdown without waiting for an idle peer's close handshake. PR 1985. Thanks @steipete.
• AWS: overlap default-VPC and managed security-group discovery, authorize SSH ingress in batches of at most four, and reuse access-refresh lookups for matching permissions; preserve scope validation, distinct default runner/workspace groups, and revocation and cleanup ordering. PR 1974, PR 1976, PR 1980. Thanks @steipete.
• Recover lost run-admission responses using a client-chosen identity and an atomic initial history record. Recovery stays within the original invocation and request budget, verifies the authenticated request binding, and never replays remote execution. PR 1970, Issue 1962. Thanks @steipete.
• Keep failure-capture scratch files outside tested checkouts, bound archive creation and streamed SSH downloads, and publish downloads atomically after size and disk-space checks. Unknown failures point to recorded-run or retained-lease diagnosis instead of an unchanged full rerun. PR 1983. Thanks @vincentkoc.
• GCP: surface bounded API error summaries and preserve quoted and multiline JSON diagnostics after credential redaction, so lease failures retain their useful cause. PR 1984. Thanks @steipete.
• Azure: recover retained legacy shared-infrastructure fences on the next lease only after verifying that the relevant resources are absent or terminal and the fence owner is unchanged; active operations remain protected. PR 1982. Thanks @steipete.
• Islo: report failed stdout/stderr delivery instead of silently succeeding after losing command output; preserve remote exit codes when stream decoding and delivery finish successfully. PR 1969.
• Enforce controller and coordinator token-command output limits consistently during pipe copying, preserving the existing overflow errors and command deadlines. PR 1971.
• Add scoped AWS provisioning diagnostics for credential preparation, signing, SDK request time, and retry-loop signing counts, keeping concurrent operations separate without changing retry behavior or recording request material. PR 1968. Thanks @steipete.
• Retain sanitized measured-image publication outcomes after success, failure, or interruption, with validated partial cohort measurements, opaque promotion binding, and final rollback and cleanup state. Runner loss leaves the initialized conservative outcome for investigation. PR 1986. Thanks @vincentkoc.

Companion integration

• OpenClaw warm-image cleanup: OpenClaw builds containing PR 142166 restore maintenance when worker profiles use different Crabbox executables. Cleanup tries each configured catalog, retains deletion obligations on errors or deadline exhaustion, and preserves cancellation and allocation pins. Update OpenClaw separately to receive this plugin fix. Thanks @steipete.

Maintenance

• Consolidate bounded byte buffers across command capture, controller/token helpers, SSH diagnostics, Agent Sandbox, and Blacksmith while preserving limits, cancellation, snapshot isolation, truncation visibility, exit handling, and Actions URL discovery. PR 1972, PR 1973, PR 1977. Thanks @steipete.
• Share service-control run-option validation across FastAPI Cloud, Railway, and Unikraft Cloud while preserving rejection messages, precedence, and refusal before provider access. PR 1979. Thanks @steipete.
• Consolidate generated CodeSandbox, CUA, and OpenSandbox configuration bindings while preserving defaults, precedence, validation timing, trusted-only bridge settings, API URL restrictions, and CLI-only stale-claim cleanup. PR 1988, PR 1989, PR 1990. Thanks @steipete.
• Keep CUA runtime and Python bridge defaults aligned with declared configuration, preserving custom SDK imports, whitespace fallback behavior, and read-only diagnostics. PR 1992. Thanks @steipete.