[adiman9]

One project per cloud dev environment. a4 dev up now holds the environment it runs against, so two projects can't overwrite each other's deployments in one environment.

What changes

• Taking the environment. a4 dev up takes the environment's lease before it deploys anything (POST /api/dev/environments/:env/lease), renews it every 20 s and releases it on exit. A killed run's lease lapses after about a minute.
• A second project is refused. Its a4 dev up gets devenv-environment-leased with the holder's name and deploys nothing. The message names a4 dev up --take-over and a4 dev branch (a copy of the environment for the second project).
• --take-over (new flag) moves the environment to this project. The previous project's deployments there stop being served.
• Fenced writes. Protocol deployment create, activate and disable, and environment stack builds, carry the lease generation in the Arete-Dev-Lease-Generation header.
• Losing the environment. When a renewal or any write is refused with devenv-lease-lost, a4 dev up stops:
  • it prints "this environment was taken over by ; nothing more was written" and exits non-zero;
  • its automations runner and its file watcher stop with it;
  • it never retries the write under a new lease.
• Status. a4 dev status (a "held by" line, and lease in --json) and the dev_status MCP tool show who holds the environment.
• Docs. A "One project per environment" section in cli/local-development.mdx, and the flag in cli/commands.mdx.

Fork state (funded wallets, warps, scenarios, resets) stays shared and unaffected.

Compatibility

An Arete API without environment leases answers the lease route with a plain 404 (no error code). a4 dev up then runs exactly as before, without a lease (one line in a4.log). Status omits the holder. The API also accepts writes without the header while no lease is held, so this release and the API change can ship in either order. The intended order is the API first, then this release.

Tests

• commands::dev::lease unit tests:
  • lease-lost detection in typed and API errors, and the exit message;
  • project ids are stable per checkout, differ across checkouts, and don't contain the path.
• cargo test -p a4-cli --bin a4 -- commands::dev: 105 passed.
• cargo test -p arete-mcp: 284 passed.
• cargo clippy -p arete-mcp -p a4-cli --tests -- -D warnings: clean.
• The server-side behaviour (refusal, takeover, fenced writes) is tested against the API with a database.

[vercel]

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
arete-docs	Ready	Preview	Oct 31, 2026 3:04pm UTC

[greptile-apps]

Confidence Score: 5/5

[Medium impact] The PR appears safe to merge; no new actionable issue remains.

Summary

Adds one project per cloud dev environment through renewable leases and checks on deployment writes.

• Each cloud dev environment serves one project's deployments at a time.
• Status reports which project holds a cloud dev environment.

Diagram

%%{init: {'theme': 'neutral'}}%%
flowchart TD
  A[a4 dev up] --> B[Start local services]
  B --> C{Take environment lease}
  C -->|Refused| D[Stop local services and exit]
  C -->|Held| E[Deploy with lease generation]
  E --> F[Renew lease and watch files]
  F -->|Stop or lease lost| G[Stop runner and local services]
  G --> H[Release lease with a short timeout]
  H --> I[Shut down runtime without waiting for abandoned work]
  I --> J[Exit]

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_{Reviews (7) · Last reviewed commit: "fix(cli): a takeover mid-build ends a4 d..." · Reviewed by Greptile}