Deep Dive
Air - Deep Dive
Technical architecture of the Air background daemon: update management, resilient downloads, authentication, and health monitoring via gRPC.
Air - Deep Dive
Air is a persistent background sidecar daemon in the Land project. It runs alongside Mountain and offloads resource-intensive operations — update checking, artifact downloads, cryptographic authentication — so the editor remains responsive.
Architecture 🚀
Air is a standalone Rust binary built around a central gRPC server on port 50053. It receives task delegation from Mountain via the Vine/Air.proto protocol and streams progress events back.
Mountain Core -[gRPC]-> Air gRPC Server (port 50053) -[routes]-> Update/Download/Auth/Health modulesKey Modules 🧩
| Path | Responsibility |
|---|---|
Source/Binary.rs | Entry point; bootstraps Tokio runtime |
Source/Initialize/ | Startup sequence: config loading, server binding |
Source/Vine/ | gRPC server implementation via tonic |
Source/Updates/ | Update lifecycle: check, download, verify, apply patches |
Source/Downloader/ | Resilient downloads with pause, resume, and retry |
Source/Authentication/ | Cryptographic signing and secure token storage |
Source/HTTP/ | HTTP client routing through Mist local DNS resolver |
Source/HealthCheck/ | Self-monitoring watchdog |
Source/Metrics/ | Telemetry collection and reporting |
Source/Logging/ | Structured tracing output |
Source/CLI/ | Command-line argument parsing |
Source/Resilience/ | Retry logic and circuit breakers |
Source/Security/ | Signature verification and secure storage |
Source/Configuration/ | Runtime config loading and hot-reload |
Data Flow 🔄
Mountain delegates an update check to Air over gRPC. Air queries the update server, returns release metadata, and upon Mountain’s request begins a resilient download. Progress events stream back to Mountain via bidirectional gRPC.
Port allocation:
- Air:
[::1]:50053 - Cocoon:
[::1]:50052
Integration Points 🔗
| Connecting Element | Direction | Mechanism | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mountain | Bidirectional | gRPC over Vine/Air.proto | Task delegation and progress streaming |
| Mist | Inbound | Local DNS resolver | Air’s HTTP client uses Mist for secure DNS |
| Vine | Inbound | Protocol definition | Air.proto defines service contracts; tonic generates server stubs |
Configuration ⚙️
| Parameter | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Bind address | CLI flag / environment | Default [::1]:50053, overridable for testing |
| Update server URL | Configuration file | Base URL for checking and downloading updates |
| Download cache directory | Configuration file | Storage location for partial downloads |
| Health check interval | Configuration file | Self-monitoring frequency |
| Log level | RUST_LOG environment variable | Tracing filter for structured output |
Air is spawned automatically by Mountain at startup. Mountain checks for an existing Air process before spawning a new instance to prevent duplicates.