legalgate

README

legalgate-go

About — One of several shared libraries/tools behind a personal homelab "fleet" of small apps. Published to show the design decisions behind these cross-cutting concerns. Authored and maintained with Claude Code (Anthropic's agentic CLI), not hand-written.

This is a public repository — keep internal infrastructure details (hostnames, secret paths, private URLs, internal issue/MR references) out of code, comments, and commit messages.

A tiny, fail-closed "is this policy in force yet?" gate for Go services.

When a service announces an adverse policy change — a new data-retention rule, an account-deletion policy — with a future effective date, the code path that enforces the new rule has to stay behind a gate until that date arrives. Two properties matter:

• Time-zone honesty. The effective date is a calendar date (YYYY-MM-DD) that means midnight in the operator's timezone (KST), not UTC. Comparing a bare date against time.Now() in the wrong zone shifts the cutover by up to a day.
• Fail-closed. A malformed or missing effective date must be treated as not yet in force — never enforce an announced-but-not-yet-effective policy because of a config typo.

Collapsing that into one audited function keeps every service in the fleet gating grace-vs-enforce transitions identically.

Usage

import (
	"time"

	"github.com/etamong-playground/legalgate-go"
)

if legalgate.PolicyInForce(cfg.DeletionPolicyEffectiveDate, time.Now()) {
	// the new policy is in force — enforce it (e.g. de-identify)
} else {
	// still inside the announced grace window — keep the old behavior
}

effectiveDate is YYYY-MM-DD, interpreted at KST midnight. A value that fails to parse returns false (fail-closed).

Acknowledgements

No third-party dependencies — standard library time only.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Documentation

Overview

Package legalgate is a tiny, fail-closed "is this policy in force yet?" gate.

When a service announces an adverse policy change (a new data-retention or account-deletion rule, say) with a future effective date, the code path that enforces the new rule must stay gated until that date arrives — and must fail closed (treat the policy as not yet in force) when the configured date is malformed, so a typo can never silently enforce a policy early.

Index

• func PolicyInForce(effectiveDate string, now time.Time) bool

Functions

func PolicyInForce

func PolicyInForce(effectiveDate string, now time.Time) bool

PolicyInForce reports whether the policy with the given effective date (YYYY-MM-DD, interpreted at KST midnight) is in force at now.

A malformed effectiveDate returns false (fail-closed): the announced policy is treated as not yet in force rather than risk enforcing it early.