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The publishability gate caught internal tooling names and developer paths but nothing site-specific, so roughly sixty leaks reached the wiki: the site name in ten documents, real fleet hostnames in the collector and GE-Enforce examples, an internal database name through the whole import guide, imaging-share paths, and a maintainer's username as the Deciders line of every ADR and inside a generated curl example. None of it is a security matter on an air-gapped fleet. It matters because these pages are read by engineers at other plants, and a document that names one site throughout reads as that site's notes rather than a product's documentation - which is exactly what it then gets treated as. Examples now use neutral hostnames, the site is "the reference site" where the distinction carries meaning, and ADRs are decided by "ShopDB maintainers". The gate carries all of these patterns, so the next one fails a build. Two documents leave docs/ because they were never written for an outside reader. PROJECT-REVIEW.md is an internal health memo pinned to a commit from July, whose headline finding (an untracked playbook) has since been fixed - it is history, and git holds it. PILOT-DEPLOY.md is one site's own cutover runbook, complete with a "re-measure before publishing" placeholder; it moves next to the loader it belongs to, in scripts/site_imports/wjf/. ADR-015 is AMENDED rather than rewritten. Its enforcement section still said report-only and its backlog still listed hardcodes that are now cleared, which left the record contradicting itself. The amendment says what changed and why the report-only period ended; the original text stays, because what the decision looked like when it was taken is the part worth keeping. Also corrects llms.txt's response envelope, which had errors at the top level and pagination at meta.total. Both are nested one deeper, so anything written against that description read undefined on every error it tried to handle.
149 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
149 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
# ADR-009: Frontend plugin gating
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- **Status:** ACCEPTED
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- **Date:** 2026-07-10
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- **Deciders:** ShopDB maintainers
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- **Supersedes:** none
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## Context
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The backend plugin system (ADR-002, ADR-003) lets an operator disable a
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plugin. Disabling it unregisters the plugin's API blueprint, drops its
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rows from global search (see `test_search_disabled`), and removes its
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entry from `get_navigation_items()`, so the disabled feature's sidebar
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link disappears.
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The frontend told a different story. Every plugin's Vue routes and views
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ship inside the core bundle. `frontend/src/router/index.js` auto-discovers
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them with `import.meta.glob('./routes/*.js')`, so a route like `/usb` or
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`/printers/3` is registered regardless of whether the owning backend
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plugin is enabled. A user who typed the URL, followed a stale bookmark,
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or clicked a cross-link reached a page whose API calls all 404, landing
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on a broken shell instead of a clean redirect. The navigation was already
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data-driven; direct-URL reachability was the gap.
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There is no frontend plugin system yet. The product is packaged as one
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core Flask app plus backend-only plugins; the Vue app is monolithic and
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build-time static. Any gating has to live in core frontend code because
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that is the only place the plugin routes exist.
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## Decision
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### Step 1 (this ADR, implemented): route-level gating
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Plugin-owned frontend routes are gated against the backend's enabled-plugin
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list. This is the whole of what ships now.
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1. **Enabled-list endpoint.** A new `GET /api/plugins/enabled`
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(`jwt_required(optional=True)`) returns a flat JSON array of enabled
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plugin name strings and nothing else. It is a cheap registry read
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(`registry.get_enabled_plugins()`), no database access. Exposing it to
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anonymous callers is safe because `GET /api/dashboard/navigation`
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already leaks the same enabled/disabled signal, and unauthenticated
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kiosk routes (`/tv`) need the answer too. It carries no metadata, so it
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reveals strictly less than the equally-anonymous but metadata-carrying
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`GET /api/plugins` (also `jwt_required(optional=True)`; only the
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`PUT /api/plugins/<name>` toggle is admin-gated).
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2. **Route tagging.** Every plugin-owned route carries `meta.plugin =
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'<pluginname>'`. This covers the per-plugin route modules
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(`routes/computers.js`, `routes/equipment.js`, ...) and the
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plugin-owned routes that physically live in core files: the
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PC-relationships and toner reports, the slide manager and `/tv`
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dashboard (slides), the printer-QR and USB-label print pages, and the
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employee-detail page. Genuinely core routes (dashboard, search, map,
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applications, reference-data settings) stay untagged and are never
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gated.
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3. **Cached fetch, fail-open.** A composable
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(`composables/enabledPlugins.js`) fetches the list exactly once behind
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a cached promise. If the fetch fails or returns a non-array, the code
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fails **open**: every plugin is treated as enabled. A transient API
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error must never brick navigation. The cost is that a disabled
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plugin's page is briefly reachable during an outage, which is
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acceptable because its API calls would fail anyway and the next
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successful fetch closes the gap.
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4. **Router guard.** `router.beforeEach` awaits the cached fetch when the
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target route has `meta.plugin`. If that plugin is not enabled it
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redirects to `/` and raises an info toast. The endpoint is
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jwt-optional, so the guard works for both authenticated pages and the
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unauthenticated `/tv` kiosk route.
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This is intentionally a thin layer. It does not change the plugin
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contract surface, so `__contract_version__` does not move: adding a core
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HTTP endpoint and tagging core-shipped routes are not plugin-contract
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changes. Plugins still ship no frontend code of their own.
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### Non-goals for step 1
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- No build-time or runtime loading of plugin-authored Vue code.
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- No per-permission or per-role route gating (that stays with the
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existing `requiresAuth` / `requiresAdmin` meta flags).
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- No removal of disabled routes from the route table; they remain
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registered and are intercepted by the guard. Keeping them registered
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avoids a rebuild when a plugin is toggled and keeps the redirect path
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simple.
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## Future direction (PROPOSED, not implemented)
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Step 1 gates routes that core already owns. The longer-term goal is a
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real frontend-plugin contract where a plugin ships its own frontend and
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core discovers it, mirroring the backend model. Sketch:
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1. **Plugin-owned frontend tree.** Each plugin gains a
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`plugins/<name>/frontend/` directory holding its route module, views,
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and any plugin-specific components. Core stops carrying `views/usb`,
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`views/printers`, and so on.
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2. **Build-time discovery.** The Vite build discovers plugin frontends
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with a glob over `plugins/*/frontend/routes.js` (analogous to today's
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`import.meta.glob('./routes/*.js')`), so a plugin's presence in the
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tree is what puts its routes in the bundle. Combined with the step-1
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enabled-list gate, a plugin that is absent from the build ships no
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code and a plugin that is present-but-disabled is route-gated at
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runtime.
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3. **Shared component + registration contract.** Plugins register into
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named extension points instead of editing core files: an `iconMap`
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registration for nav/asset icons, asset-detail panels, map-marker
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renderers, and search-result renderers (the "Frontend hook contract"
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already listed as deferred in docs/ROADMAP.md). Core exposes a
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stable set of shared components (form controls, detail-page shells,
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table primitives) as the plugin frontend's only allowed core imports,
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the frontend analogue of the `shopdb.api` namespace.
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4. **Versioned frontend contract.** The shared-component and
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registration surface would be versioned the same way the backend
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contract is (ADR-002), so a plugin frontend can declare the core
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frontend range it needs.
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### Tradeoffs of the future direction
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- **Pro:** true plugin self-containment; a site can drop in or remove a
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plugin (frontend and backend together) without patching core; smaller
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core; clearer ownership.
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- **Con:** significant build-system work (per-plugin Vite entry
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discovery, code-splitting, dev-server HMR across the plugin tree); a
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new versioned frontend contract to maintain and document; a migration
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that moves ten plugins' worth of views out of core; risk of a leaky
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shared-component surface becoming an accidental contract. The payoff
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only matters once external (out-of-tree) plugins with their own
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frontends are a real requirement. Until then, step 1's route gating
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delivers the user-visible correctness (no reachable dead pages) at a
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fraction of the cost.
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## Consequences
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- Disabling a backend plugin now makes its frontend routes redirect to
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the dashboard instead of loading a broken shell. Behavior matches the
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already-dynamic navigation.
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- One extra lightweight request at app boot (`GET /api/plugins/enabled`),
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cached for the session.
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- Fail-open means gating is a UX guardrail, not a security control. It is
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not a substitute for backend authorization: the API still enforces auth
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and the disabled plugin's endpoints are simply unregistered. Never rely
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on route gating to protect data.
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- The future frontend-plugin contract remains open work; this ADR records
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the direction and its cost so a later decision can pick it up.
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