Under the hood

This bucket is for plugin authors, adapter writers, and contributors. If you only want to build a backend on top of Nwire, the build path is what you want — this one assumes you're reaching for the framework's machinery.

Where to start

• Architecture sketch — the engineering reasoning behind every primitive. Read this first.
• Hook contract matrix — the §07 table from the sketch, expanded with examples.
• Framework events + tense-based dispatch — AppRegistering / AppBooting / AppBooted / AppReady / AppShuttingDown / AppShutdown and how tense maps to dispatch mode.

Authoring

• Plugin authoring (definePlugin closure form) — provide / on / before / after / middleware / boot / shutdown inside one closure.
• Writing an adapter — the contract pattern for storage / mail / queue / bus. Ship a contract package; ship N adapter packages opt-in.

Runtime topics

• Cross-service bus + integration events — module.needs.externalEvents + @nwire/bus + @nwire/bus-nats. Topology stays flexible: same modules run monolith or split.
• Telemetry pipeline (OTel bridge) — runtime.onTelemetry tagged-union stream; how @nwire/telemetry-otel maps 22 kinds to OTLP spans + events.
• Studio internals — what .nwire/*.json looks like, how the scanner produces it, how /__nwire/* middleware serves it, how Studio's runner supervisor works.

Repo invariants

• Domain code never imports from wires. Modules don't own routes; transports live at the app layer.
• Contract packages ship in-memory defaults. Persistent adapters are separate packages a consumer adds explicitly.
• One author, one voice. Every file should look like the same engineer wrote it; drift is the enemy.

See AGENTS.md for the full repo conventions.