Portable Desktop module

[bpmct]

A discussion dedicated to the Portable Desktop module. Share your thoughts, questions, and feedback here.

Module Scorecard

Presentation & Onboarding	Credential Hygiene	Restricted-Environment Readiness	Engineering Quality	Overall
12 / 17	16 / 20	11 / 20	7 / 10	69 / 100

Drilldown

Track: Utility (downloads and runs a VNC desktop binary; not an AI agent or an editor/IDE — track section omitted per rubric).

Presentation & Onboarding — 12 / 17

Criterion	Max	Score	Notes
Configuration-mode examples	12	12	README shows three worked examples covering the module's main modes: default install, custom download URL + checksum verification, and additional copy to install_dir. Defaults (null) are sensible and shown.
Visual preview	5	0	No image, GIF, or video embedded in README (despite this being a desktop/VNC tool, where a screenshot would be especially relevant).

Credential Hygiene — 16 / 20

Criterion	Max	Score	Notes
Secrets marked sensitive	16	16	Module has no credential/secret inputs (only url, sha256, install_dir, agent_id); README contains no inline secrets. Vacuously satisfied.
Non-hardcoded auth path	4	N/A	Module performs no authentication of any kind (no cloud/provider auth, no API keys) — concern does not exist by construction. Excluded from denominator.

Restricted-Environment Readiness — 11 / 20

Criterion	Max	Score	Notes
Mirrorable artifact source	5	5	The url variable overrides the default GitHub release download URL used in local.amd64_url/local.arm64_url (main.tf), and is documented with a worked example in the README.
Bring-your-own binary	10	5	run.sh skips download if portabledesktop is already on PATH or already present at BINARY_PATH, enabling baked-in images — but this behavior is never mentioned in the README (only visible in source), so it's under-documented.
Egress transparency	3	0	No dedicated network/offline/air-gapped section in README; the download source is only inferable from the url variable description.
Runs without sudo	2	1	Core install (download to CODER_SCRIPT_DATA_DIR, symlink to CODER_SCRIPT_BIN_DIR) never calls sudo. sudo is only invoked as a fallback for the optional install_dir copy, after a non-root cp attempt first — matches "optional feature with working fallback" → half credit.

Engineering Quality — 7 / 10

Criterion	Max	Score	Notes
Input quality	6	3	All 4 variables (agent_id, install_dir, url, sha256) have clear descriptions and sensible null defaults, but no validation blocks are present anywhere in main.tf.
Test coverage	4	4	.tftest.hcl covers plan-level business logic (default vars, custom install_dir, custom url/sha256); main.test.ts provides thorough end-to-end coverage (install success, checksum match/mismatch/skip, sudo fallback, wget fallback, install_dir auto-creation).

Overall — 69 / 100

Raw 46 / 67 → round(46 / 67 × 100) = 69

---

Scored against SCORECARD.md on 2026-11-09 with solstice-1.