install.sh: report the install once, so installs can be paired to nodes

[Alexgodoroja]

Nothing today connects "someone ran the installer" to "a node appeared on the network". Release download counts are per-tag and bot-polluted; the registry only ever sees nodes that made it all the way to registration. The gap between the two is invisible — and it is the number actually worth having.

On a first install only, this mints a random install_id, writes ~/.pilot/install.json, and POSTs that file once to https://telemetry.pilotprotocol.network/v1/installs.

The file on disk IS the payload

cat ~/.pilot/install.json answers "what did it send" exactly, with nothing to cross-check:

{ "install_id": "546fcaaacad3432236db3b8a30234dd7",
  "ts": "2026-08-28T01:17:02Z", "entrypoint": "curl-sh",
  "channel": "stable", "tag": "v1.13.9",
  "platform": "linux/arm64", "upgrade": false }

No email, hostname, username, key material, or paths. The server additionally records the request's country and a salted hash of the IP — never the address.

Guarded on the file, not $UPDATING

Matching the config.json and auto-update.json writes above. Re-running the installer is a repair or an upgrade, not a new install: re-minting would double-count and orphan the pair already reported under the old id. A host whose binaries were removed for a clean reinstall keeps the id it already reported.

Opt-out is an env var, not a flag

PILOT_ANALYTICS=0 (or false/no/off). Deliberately not a CLI flag — it stays out of --help, never prompts, and never gates the install. Anything unrecognised means on, the same way common/consent treats a malformed consent flag as true. The doc comment sits below line 32 so --help, which prints lines 4–32, is byte-identical to before.

It cannot block or fail an install

The POST is backgrounded with a hard 2s cap and its exit status discarded. A lost report is always preferable to a blocked install, so the send is fire-and-forget: on a very slow network the report is dropped rather than waited on.

The header no longer over-promises

"Send any personal data anywhere" was true before this change and would not have been after. It is amended, and a new INSTALL ANALYTICS section states exactly what is sent and how to turn it off.

Verified end-to-end

Ran in a Debian container as a non-root user with no TTY — a genuine curl | sh path, against the live ingest:

check	result
first install	row in telemetry.installs, upgrade=false
PILOT_ANALYTICS=0	no install.json, nothing sent
re-run after opting out	mints id, reports, upgrade=true correctly detected
third run	install.json unchanged, no second row
shellcheck -s sh	0 findings, same as baseline

Merging this publishes immediately

notify-install-sh-sync.yml dispatches to the website's sync-install-sh.yml, which uploads to the pilot-release-assets R2 bucket. There is no separate release step — merge means live for every new install.

Depends on

The receiving endpoint (POST /v1/installs + the telemetry.installs table) is already deployed and live on pilot-telemetry revision -00011-w58, so this can merge in either order. That change is committed but unpushed — I have READ on pilot-protocol/telemetry and it is private with forking disabled, so it needs someone with write access.

Opened from a fork because this account has push=false on pilot-protocol/release.

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