First run

Screen 1 — mode selection

Shown exactly once, before anything else, when the config has no deployment values yet. It is unauthenticated by necessity — there is nobody to authenticate yet.

One question, two cards:

Localhost — a personal machine. A default user is allowed and login is optional. This is the default.

Central server — a shared host. Login is required and there is no default user.

Pick one, continue, and the answer is written to config with a configured flag. The screen never appears again. An admin can change it later from the deployment editor.

Screen 2 — the movement data

The app tells you the record is not on this computer and gives you the exact clone command for your machine.

Paste it into a terminal. Switch back to the browser. The app has already let you in — no refresh, no button, no restarting anything.

The rule that came out of getting this wrong

This screen once made the whole product look broken while nothing was wrong. On a machine where the repository was present and resolving correctly, the gate stayed up — because the screen never re-asked, and a missing repo was remembered for the life of the backend process.

A citizen who can see the folder on disk while the app insists it is absent has just been handed our own Pillar 4 deadlock — you cannot prove it, so you cannot proceed — by the app that exists to argue against it.

Four rules came out of that, and they generalise well past this screen:

1. Any UI that reports the absence of something the user is actively creating must re-ask on its own. A one-shot check plus a permanent cache is how a setup screen becomes a wall.
2. Cache a "yes" forever if you like; never cache a "no". The thing that was missing is precisely the thing somebody is fixing right now.
3. Look generously, accept strictly. The resolver probes about fifty plausible locations — beside the repo, inside it, ancestors, the working directory, common checkout parents, alternate spellings — and still only accepts a directory carrying the marker file.
4. Say what you saw, not just that you failed. "There is a folder there and it has no marker file" is a different instruction from "clone this", and only one of them matches what the citizen is looking at.

Screen 3 — sign in, or do not

On your own machine, skip it. You are the default user and everything works. Sign in when you want to join a community or publish something.