Authorization for the admin panel and the admin API has lived entirely in one auth_request regex in an Nginx Proxy Manager config outside this repository. That control is real and it works — nothing is publicly exposed today — but it is invisible from the code, untested here, and not reviewed when this code changes. Three things follow from that, and the first is the one worth the change.
An admin route added at a path the regex does not match is unprotected the moment it is written, and nothing in Express indicates that. Anything reaching the published container port directly bypasses authentik entirely. And locally there is no gate at all, so no developer ever sees the boundary being enforced.
requireAdminGate is attached to each admin router rather than to a path prefix, which is what makes it useful rather than merely redundant with the proxy. An admin router added later at some other path inherits the gate; because the proxy only injects the header on paths its regex matches, that router refuses on its first request instead of being quietly public. A 403 in that situation is the boundary reporting that it has drifted.
The gate is optional, and unset means exactly today's behaviour. That keeps local development and all 113 existing admin test call sites working untouched, and means shipping the image before configuring the proxy cannot take the admin panel down. What it does not do is stay silent about it: the server warns at boot when the gate is inactive, naming what is unprotected. This project has been bitten repeatedly by controls that report success while doing nothing, and an unconfigured gate should be a visible choice rather than an invisible one.
An empty value is treated as unset rather than as a secret, because enforcing an empty secret would admit any caller sending an empty header. Comparison is timing-safe over SHA-256 digests of both sides: timingSafeEqual throws on buffers of unequal length, so comparing raw values would turn a short header into a 500 rather than a 403, and a length check first would leak the secret's length.
Turning it on requires the secret in two places at once — the stack environment and a proxy_set_header line on the gated location in NPM. Setting only one gives 403s until the other catches up. That coupling, and the three consequences above, are now written into the README beside the deployment section, since none of it is visible from the code.
Verified over real HTTP as well as in tests. Booting without the secret logs the warning and serves admin normally; booting with it returns 403 for a missing header, 403 for a wrong one, 200 for the right one, and leaves the public storefront at 200 throughout, with each refusal logged distinguishably and without echoing the value it was sent. 8 new unit tests, 9 new integration tests covering every admin router separately — a correct middleware nobody mounted would pass the unit tests and protect nothing. 106 unit and 153 integration passing, lint 0 errors and 8 warnings unchanged.
Refs #63
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
TypeScript's strict mode checks types and nothing else, so nothing enforced the React hook rules, the SonarJS rules, or unhandled-promise detection. Adds a flat config per workspace, a lint script in each, and a lint job in tests.yml.
The rule selection is the substance of this change and is measured rather than guessed. A full-strength config reports 435 violations across 50 files, but 325 of those are the no-unsafe-* family from recommendedTypeChecked, every one downstream of pool.query() returning any rows and untyped fetch responses. Typing those boundaries is the whole of #65, so enabling the rules here would ship a linter whose output is three-quarters another issue's backlog — the reliable way to teach everyone to ignore lint output. This enables recommended plus the two type-aware rules that catch defects rather than describe type debt, which leaves 110 findings.
Both configs downgrade every preset to a warning and then list the error rules explicitly at the bottom, so the CI gate is readable in one place instead of inferred from four presets' defaults. Errors are no-floating-promises, no-misused-promises, rules-of-hooks, exhaustive-deps and jsx-a11y/alt-text; everything else warns. No --max-warnings flag is needed because ESLint already exits non-zero on errors and zero on warnings. no-misused-promises runs with checksVoidReturn.attributes false, since onClick={async () => ...} is idiomatic React and safe when the handler catches its own errors — at the default it flags every antd button in the admin screens, 25 of its 28 hits, and a rule that is 89% noise gets switched off within a week.
The 37 errors this surfaced were mostly not the mechanical fix they looked like. The plan assumed the 30 floating promises were fire-and-forget loaders that already handled their own failures, which was true of the one sampled when writing the design and false for most of the rest: Admin, Categories, Customers, Tags, Settings, Account and CustomerAuthContext all had no rejection handling at all, so `void` on them would have hidden real failures rather than annotated deliberate ones. Each of those loaders now catches and surfaces the failure before the call site voids it. The CustomerAuthContext one was a live bug — a rejected fetchMe left loading true forever, rendering as a permanent spinner instead of a signed-out page.
Admin's load became a useCallback so its effect can name it honestly rather than suppress the dependency, Categories' drop handler was split so the function antd receives returns void as its type says, and Cart's effect now names refreshCartContext, which is a useCallback with an empty dependency list and so cannot re-run it. The only disable added is in asyncRoute, where returning a promise where Express expects void is the entire point of the wrapper and the promise cannot reject.
Two of the issue's premises did not survive measurement, both recorded in the spec: exhaustive-deps flags 2 cases rather than the 10 inferred from empty dependency arrays, and the backend was already clean on the defect rules because #59 wrapped every async route.
Verified: lint, build, 78 unit, 134 integration and 83 e2e all pass in both workspaces, and the CI gate was confirmed to fail by introducing a deliberate violation rather than by assuming the job is wired correctly.
Closes#60
bermudalamb