ConnectOnionThe paid launcher was on the wrong loop
Expose an async Onionwright paid launcher for the Patchright event loop while preserving charge, renewal, expiry, and release ownership.
By ConnectOnion Team · 2 min read · 314 words
The paid-browser PR and the async-browser PRs were each green. That made their integration look like a merge-order problem: put the paid branch on top, resolve the overlapping browser files, and run the tests again.
The conflict was architectural, not textual. ConnectOnion's final 1.8 runtime owns Patchright's async API on one event loop. Onionwright's paid launcher owned the sync Playwright API. A mock could accept either object, so the old seam test proved only that ConnectOnion passed four arguments in the right order. A real launch would call synchronous methods on an async driver and fail after the paid boundary had already been approached.
The correction was to put the missing boundary where the lifecycle already lived. Onionwright now exposes an async paid launcher alongside the synchronous one. It still owns the exact prepared executable, first charge, licence flag, renewal supervisor, signed expiry, and release. ConnectOnion keeps ownership of its async page interaction layer. Neither repository reimplements the other's responsibility.
Cancellation made the boundary sharper. A task can be cancelled while the blocking start request is still running in a worker thread. Returning immediately would leave us unable to know whether the server charged and created a session. The launcher therefore completes that irreversible request, releases any session it produced, and only then propagates cancellation. The same rule applies when Chromium startup is cancelled after charging.
The final test no longer substitutes a fake launch_paid function. CI checks out
both repositories, builds a real Onionwright PreparedBrowser, enters
ConnectOnion through its synchronous public facade, crosses the actual async paid
launcher, verifies the exact executable and licence-file arguments, then observes
one context close, one server release, and one driver stop.
Two green branches are not an integration test. When one branch changes the execution model, every irreversible boundary downstream must speak that model directly—and the test must cross the real boundary rather than a shape-compatible mock.