Admin token rotation

PYLON_ADMIN_TOKEN authenticates every privileged route:

• /api/auth/session POST in non-dev
• /api/auth/upgrade in non-dev
• /api/admin/users/:id/export (GDPR export)
• /api/admin/users/:id/purge (GDPR delete)
• /api/sync/push from admin contexts
• Jobs / workflows / scheduler control planes
• /studio in non-dev

Bulk backup routes (GET /api/export, GET /api/export/<entity>, and POST /api/import) require admin access without an active tenant. These routes read or write raw data across tenants. An admin session with an active tenant cannot use them. Treat the token like an SSH key:

• minimum 32 bytes of randomness
• never commit it to git
• rotate it on any suspicion of compromise

​

Without downtime (two-token rotation)

The server only reads PYLON_ADMIN_TOKEN at startup. Rotation requires a restart. To do it without dropping traffic:

1. Prepare. Generate the new token:
   openssl rand -hex 32 > /etc/pylon/admin_token.new
   
2. Deploy side-by-side. Start a new instance with the new token and let the load balancer health check promote it. Then send SIGTERM to the old instance. It answers /health/ready with 503 and finishes the requests it has before it exits; see Deploy → Shutdown and rolling deploys.
3. Update clients. Update any automation (CI, runbooks, cron, admin UIs) that hardcodes the old token. Search Vault, 1Password, GitHub Actions secrets, Cloudflare environment variables, and other secret stores for the old token prefix before you delete the value.
4. Verify and clean up. Test one admin endpoint with the new token. If it works, delete the old token from your secret store.

​

Emergency (suspected compromise)

1. Generate a new token. Skip the no-downtime rotation process. In an emergency, the delay is not worth the risk:
   openssl rand -hex 32 > /etc/pylon/admin_token.new
   
2. Revoke every active session and force re-login. There is no global session-purge endpoint. Invalidate all sessions by clearing the session database and restarting. Every user signs back in on their next request. Sessions are recoverable; only the login is lost:
   systemctl stop pylon
   rm /var/lib/pylon/sessions.db*
   systemctl start pylon
   
3. Rotate OAuth secrets too. They share the same exposure if the admin account was used to configure them.
4. Audit audit_log for the period the old token was valid. The audit_log plugin records who did what and when.
5. File an incident report by email to [email protected].

​

On Stack0 Cloud

Admin tokens are scoped per workspace and managed through the dashboard. Rotation is a one-click operation with no downtime; Cloud handles the side-by-side restart for you. Old tokens stop working immediately on rotation.

​

Avoid

• Do not use the admin token as a session token. Reserve it as a break-glass credential for emergencies.
• Do not commit the token to git, even in a test fixture. The pre-commit hook rejects 32+ character hex strings in tracked files.
• Do not pass it as a URL query parameter. Use Authorization: Bearer only. URL parameters leak into proxy logs and browser history.
• Do not reuse the token across environments. A staging token and a production token must differ.

​

Rotation cadence

Set a calendar reminder. Add it to your runbook.