The Skills Hub 'Browse Hub' landing page and index-backed search render
empty on fresh deployments (e.g. Fly.io VPS agents) with no stale cache.
Root cause: the centralized index at /docs/api/skills-index.json is a
large body (~34MB, tens of MB compressed) served with Content-Encoding:
br. httpx's streaming Brotli decoder — backed by brotlicffi 1.2.0.1,
which is pinned so aiohttp can decode Discord attachments — trips over
its own output_buffer_limit on a payload this size and raises:
DecodingError("brotli: decoder process called with data when
'can_accept_more_data()' is False")
_load_hermes_index() catches that (DecodingError is an httpx.HTTPError
subclass) and silently falls back to the on-disk cache. On a fresh box
that cache never existed, so HermesIndexSource.is_available is False,
the index contributes 0 skills, and the hub landing page — which is
built solely from an empty-query index search — is blank. Existing
installs only appear to work because they serve a (possibly weeks-)stale
cached index instead.
Fix: request 'gzip, deflate' on the index fetch so httpx never
negotiates the broken Brotli path, and retry once with 'identity' if a
DecodingError still occurs (defends against a proxy that ignores the
header). Falls through to the stale cache only when both attempts fail.
Verified on a live staging VPS agent: index_available flips False->True
and the featured landing list repopulates from 0 to 12.
Also un-freezes already-deployed images: skills added after an image was
built (e.g. the 'unbroker' optional skill) become reachable again via
the index, which is the whole point of the centralized catalog.
Ben
590a19332e