[cmahmud]

Summary

This draft starts SyndCrawler v0.2 with two production-driven improvements: browser-escalation hardening and a first-class interactive operator TUI.

Browser escalation

Live VPS testing found a false negative on https://quotes.toscrape.com/js/. The raw page contained enough navigation/footer text to avoid the original thin-shell threshold while its quote cards were synthesized by inline JavaScript.

The rendering assessment now keeps the conservative placeholder/app-root signals and additionally recognizes thin pages whose inline JavaScript generates substantial DOM content. Strong document.write / document.writeln usage counts as rendering evidence; innerHTML / insertAdjacentHTML require a non-trivial inline script to reduce false positives.

The live ARM64 VPS regression now reaches:

• requires_browser: true
• engine: browser
• rendered: true
• escalated_from: http

Ubuntu 24.04 on the current trusted VPS blocks Chromium's internal sandbox under the container/AppArmor setup. The deployment therefore uses the existing explicit compatibility setting SYNCRAWLER_BROWSER_CHROMIUM_SANDBOX=false. This is documented as a trusted self-hosted compatibility mode, not a hostile multi-tenant default.

OpenTUI operator console

Adds tui/, built with React + OpenTUI using patterns from cmahmud/opentui and cmahmud/create-tui, with responsive/motion guidance from cmahmud/syndrid-tui-studio.

Functional surface:

• API / PostgreSQL / Redis health
• durable recent-crawl dashboard
• keyboard navigation and crawl inspection
• result inspection with HTTP/browser engine visibility
• create bounded crawls from a seed URL
• optional explicit crawl ID and max-pages budget
• pause / resume / cancel
• automatic dashboard/detail refresh
• responsive narrow-terminal layout
• authenticated control-plane client with clear API errors
• syndcrawler tui launcher for compiled installations
• source and standalone-binary build helpers

The TUI talks only to the authenticated control-plane API; it does not require direct Redis/PostgreSQL or Docker-socket access.

Motion and accessibility

Motion was added only after the complete functional TUI checkpoint passed CI.

• subtle active-crawl activity animation
• fetch → parse → store flow rail
• short startup title reveal
• SYNCRAWLER_TUI_REDUCED_MOTION=true static fallback
• TERM=dumb automatically uses reduced motion
• no API, form, selection, or lifecycle behavior depends on animation state

Control-plane support

Adds authenticated GET /v1/crawls with bounded offset pagination, backed by PostgreSQL recent-manifest queries. This lets the TUI display durable crawl history instead of only session-local IDs.

Validation

Exact head 8d676fcf3f94d28133906be1331ae3fb5c602bde passed CI run #395 across all lanes:

• Python 3.12
• Python 3.13
• Redis
• PostgreSQL, including crawl-list pagination
• server/control-plane API
• Docker deployment build
• browser runtime
• TUI: pinned Bun 1.4.0, TypeScript typecheck, API/motion unit tests, standalone OpenTUI compile

OpenTUI publishes a native @opentui/core-linux-arm64 package; the next VPS deployment pass will validate the compiled TUI on the actual ARM64 host.

This PR remains draft while v0.2 live workload/benchmark validation continues.