The contract check ran as an Ansible task in the middle of every provider deploy, and the two client checks ran the same way. A test that is part of the deploy cannot be run without deploying, cannot be re-run on its own, and reports its verdict as a deploy failure. Twenty-seven task files lose 491 lines to this.
It is now what it always was. Each provider ships files/test/test.sh, templates/test.env.j2 and meta/tests.yml, and test-e2e-cli stages one shared harness beside it: run.sh drives contract.sh in a throwaway container on the provider's own network, then isolation.sh for adapter-fronted providers. The read probe each provider offers moved from the calling task into meta/mcp.yml next to the allowlist it must satisfy, and the schema now rejects a read probe naming a tool outside that allowlist.
The bearer the test presents is the one a client resolves through mcp.credential, via the new mcp_client_bearer lookup over resolve_credential, which moved to utils.roles.applications.mcp so it is the same function mcp_servers renders every client connection with. The probe presented whatever the calling role passed, which for the fifteen adapter-fronted providers is a different secret than any client holds.
Sidecar isolation is read from the engine rather than measured inside the container, so it no longer needs a delegation to the node holding the task: attachment is compared by network name, which drops the gwbridge special case, and a swarm worker says it cannot measure instead of skipping silently.
Retrying is bounded by wall clock against MCP_DEADLINE_SECONDS, which scales through the same lookup('timeout') as the harness budget it has to stay under. A flag that is neither true nor false aborts rather than reading as off.
mcp-provider-probe becomes mcp-provider-cli-test: an enabled provider must ship the test rather than include the task. mcp-probe-bearer becomes mcp-adapter-bearer, tying ADAPTER_BEARER to the declared credential key now that no probe include carries it. A new integration test renders the shared env template for every provider through Ansible's own templar, so a later change to it breaks visibly instead of poisoning twenty deploys quietly.
Hermes and OpenClaw keep their client-side proof as CLI tests of their own.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every MCP role keeps its task tree under tasks/utils/ without numeric
prefixes, so a caller can reach any of them through include_role
tasks_from. utils/roles/mapping.py holds that path as the single source.
Ansible resolves a relative include against the including file's own
directory when that file was reached by path, but against tasks/ when it
was reached through tasks_from. The same file therefore loaded from its
own role and failed from a caller using tasks_from. Every nested include
now names {{ role_path }}/tasks/utils/..., which holds under both bases,
and a lint walks each tasks_from entrypoint transitively to keep it so.
The exec-gating lint learns the same form, otherwise it loses the include
chain and reports inherited IS_STACK_HOST gates as missing.
The expression resolving a provider's stored token appeared eighteen
times. plugins/lookup/mcp_credential.py replaces it, and mcp_probe_owner
disappears from eight roles: it was only ever a step towards the bearer
and no probe read it.
The Hermes and OpenClaw probes stop aborting the play while it is still
running. Roles deploy in dependency order, so a client probing during its
own role can run before a provider exists at all, and failing there
prevents that provider from ever deploying. The verdict moves to the
reconciliation pass, gated on MCP_RECONCILE_STRICT, which the reconciler
sets and group_vars declares so the readers need no default.
The sys-svc-mcp-reconcile role is added here; wiring it into a stage is a
separate change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>