HydraIssues

Issues / #762
Portal links creators to a PRIVATE template repo (404 for everyone outside the org)
done bug Project: hydramancer Parent: #761 Reporter: cederik 1 Oct 2026 21:55

Description

The live /experience page tells creators "Get the Hydra Unreal Template" and links to https://github.com/cederikdotcom/hydraunrealtemplate. That repo is PRIVATE (gh reports visibility PRIVATE; the remote is git@github.com:cederikdotcom/hydraunrealtemplate.git), so an unauthenticated visitor gets HTTP 404. Every external creator the portal points at the starter template hits a dead link.

By contrast cederikdotcom/hydrahelloxr returns 200, so the inconsistency is per-repo, not a GitHub-wide setting.

Blocks the 2026-10-02 workshop (#761): the plan is for students to clone the template, change the wordmark text and colour in Source/HydraUnrealTemplate/LogoCubeActor.cpp lines 44 and 47, and package it through HydraUnrealEngine. They cannot clone it.

Options, owner's call:

  1. Make the repo public. This is the real fix, because the portal already advertises the URL publicly. Check for anything in history that should not ship first.
  2. Publish a template archive to releases.experiencenet.com and point the portal at that instead, which keeps the repo private.
  3. Hand the archive out locally at the venue, which unblocks the workshop but leaves the public link broken.

Either way the portal text and the hydraunrealtemplate README both need to match whatever is chosen.

Session Context

Venue
mobile-kit

Comments (1)

api 2 Oct 2026 17:30

Closing: the owner decided the template repo stays PRIVATE, and the reason it was linked publicly has gone away.

Experience source is distributed through Perforce, not GitHub. The template now lives in the hydramancers depot at //hydramancers/main, seeded with all 23 files, and each creator gets their own stream branched from it. Nobody needs to clone the GitHub repo, so a dead public link is no longer a dead end in anyone's path.

The repo was cleaned anyway, because the work was already done and it is worth having: history rewritten to a single commit, docs/deployment-status.md and CLAUDE.md removed, the README rewritten from 182 lines of fleet validation history into 147 lines of developer documentation, and three machine references in Config and Scripts generalised.

Worth recording why it was NOT published even after that cleaning. Rewriting history does not remove the old objects from GitHub: I verified that gh api .../commits/ee04fdc and .../contents/docs/deployment-status.md?ref=ee04fdc still return the removed deployment log after the force-push. Making the repo public would therefore have exposed it to anyone holding the SHA. That log contained a live, unauthenticated 350 MB download from the internal build mirror (verified serving a real ZIP with no credentials), the MSI1060 mesh address and node id, and two expired hydratransfer links.

If the portal is ever pointed at a public template repo again, publish a FRESH repository from the clean tree rather than flipping this one.