0.6.x refuses a secret store whose path is relative or inside the content root,
because a store in the deployment directory is destroyed by an ordinary upgrade —
the failure that wiped the MxGateway API-key store on 2026-08-09 and read as an
auth outage rather than a deployment error.
The pin alone would not have protected this repo. Program.cs expands ${secret:}
before the host exists, composing secrets into a throwaway ServiceCollection with
no IHostEnvironment, so the guard would not run at the moment the migrator creates
the store. That composition now lives in SecretsRegistration with an explicit
content root — resolved to match what the host resolves later, including the
Windows-Service case where the pre-host CWD is still system32 — and is covered by
PreHostSecretsContentRootTests, verified by simulating the regression and
confirming it fails on the leftover file rather than on the exception.
The docker rig needed a fix too: /app/data is absolute but inside the container's
content root, so all 8 nodes would have failed to boot. Each node's data directory
is now mounted a second time at /data; same host directory, so existing stores
carry over untouched.
Verified: build clean, 29 test assemblies green (Playwright's 159 failures are the
pre-existing SEC-36 login baseline). Not yet deployed — the rig runs the old
config until someone redeploys.
Joseph Doherty