Deploying

Tapes does not start cassettes. A deployment starts the process, supplies its configuration and credentials, and tells tapes where to find its OpenAPI document.

public.ecr.aws/g4e5l3z3/papercomputeco/skills-cassette:<release-tag>

The image tag is the release tag verbatim, v and all — copy one from releases and use it as written, e.g. …/skills-cassette:v0.3.0. Pin a release; nightly is published but is not one.

The version is not a number anyone maintains. A release stamps the tag it is publishing at link time, and the manifest version, the image reference the manifest advertises, and the OpenAPI info block all derive from it. A source build reports 0.0.0, because a source tree is not a release and a plausible-looking number there would describe one that never happened.

It listens on 9998 by default and serves /ping, /openapi, and its API under /api/skills.

Configuration

Everything arrives through the environment, following the manifest’s config schema.

Variable	Meaning
CASSETTE_NAME	Installed name (default skills). Drives the route prefix, schema and role.
CASSETTE_CORE_URL	Tapes core API origin for reading trace transcripts. Unset disables generation (501).
CASSETTE_LLM_PROVIDER	openai (default), anthropic, or ollama.
CASSETTE_LLM_MODEL	Model override. Each provider has a default.
CASSETTE_LLM_API_KEY	Provider API key. Falls back to OPENAI_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_API_KEY.
CASSETTE_LLM_BASE_URL	Provider base URL override, for proxies and self-hosted endpoints.
TAPES_DATABASE_URL	Postgres DSN.

CASSETTE_CORE_URL requires https, except for loopback and cluster-local Service targets (*.svc, *.svc.cluster.local). Transcripts are session content; the exception exists for traffic that never leaves the cluster, not as a general opt-out.

Without an LLM key, generation answers 422 rather than failing at startup — the rest of the API keeps working, so a deployment without a provider is still a usable skills store.

Storage

[[tables]]
name = "skills"

[[tables]]
name = "skill_versions"

The cassette owns those two tables in its own Postgres schema, named after the installed cassette name, and runs its own migrations at startup. Core neither creates the schema nor grants access to it.

depends.views is empty. This cassette reads no contract views and holds no core database credential — transcripts arrive over HTTP. The only database it touches is its own.

Without TAPES_DATABASE_URL the cassette runs on a non-durable in-memory store. It will start, serve, generate and version quite happily, and lose everything on restart. That is fine for a demo and silently wrong for anything else, because nothing about the running system announces it.

Pointing tapes at it

Tapes needs the exact URL of the metadata-bearing OpenAPI document:

tapes serve --cassettes=http://127.0.0.1:9998/openapi
curl http://localhost:8081/v1/cassettes/skills

or in .tapes/config.toml:

cassettes = ["http://127.0.0.1:9998/openapi"]