Files

cproudlock f9d6b57f0f Move the documentation to the line that ships, and correct it against the code

The docs lived on one lineage and the fleet code on another. That is why six
pages described a shared fleet key as how an agent authenticates, why
COLLECTOR-AUTH had to warn that the per-PC credential code was not in the
repository it sat in, and why ADR-019 recorded a decision whose implementation
was somewhere else. Documentation that cannot see the code it documents goes
stale by construction, and no amount of editing fixes that.

So the corpus moves here: 84 files, 56 pages, 20 ADRs, the proposals, INDEX.md,
llms.txt and both gates. Filenames are unchanged, because a wiki page name is
derived from the filename and a rename breaks every link anybody saved.

THE POINT OF THE MOVE IS THE CORRECTION IT ENABLES. Every caveat that said "not
in this tree" was false the moment the files landed beside the code, so each was
rewritten from what is actually here:

- COLLECTOR-AUTH gained the real enroll request body, the two bounds on the
  unauthenticated route (per-IP rate limit, pending cap with stale rows dropped
  before a real PC is refused), and the rejected pending reason that binds to
  the endpoint identity rather than the nonce.
- ADR-019 now describes an implementation that is present, including its tests,
  and says plainly that what remains is the FLEET migration, not the code.
- proposals/device-identity claimed phase 1 was unbuilt. plugins/computers
  declares deviceid on the collector schema and prefers it over the older
  fallbacks. Corrected in the page, its summary and the index.

WINDOWS/IIS IS NOW DOCUMENTED AS THE LEGACY PATH, per the product decision, and
carefully: it is what production runs today. Every Windows page opens by saying
it is supported, not for a new site, and where a new site should go instead. No
procedure was cut - an operator on an IIS box at 2am needs these pages to work
exactly as well tomorrow. MIGRATE-TOPOLOGY stops being a footnote and becomes
the off-ramp, which is why it nearly doubled: what was there did not match how
the Docker stack really works here.

The Docker material that already lived on this line was kept and given
ownership rather than buried under the ported Windows-centric prose: DEPLOY now
describes the four services, the migrate service that runs the upgrade chain
before api starts, TLS terminated by nginx, and the plugin count corrected from
thirteen to seventeen - a number both lineages had wrong.

ROADMAP is rewritten from evidence rather than memory: what has shipped, read
out of the changelog, the ADRs and the manifests, and ahead of it exactly two
items - finalize a distributed release and polish the setup wizard.

PROJECT-MAP is generated and was stale; the GENERATOR was what was wrong.
--check passes now.

API-REFERENCE is retired to a pointer. /api/docs serves 573 operations with
derived auth, query parameters and harvested examples, and a hand-written page
competing with that is a liability. The file stays so its wiki page and its
inbound links survive.

AND THE MOVE TURNED ON A SCRUB THAT HAD NEVER RUN HERE. test_docs_publishable
keys on docs/*.md, which this line did not have, so it skipped - its own comment
predicted what would surface. Porting the corpus activated it and it found 48
lines that must not reach a published wiki: branch names abbreviating the site,
assistant-tooling paths, the site name in two deployment pages, and an employee
ID in a Windows path that the scrub does not even look for.

2026-09-19 09:10:15 -04:00

7.4 KiB

Raw Blame History

ADR-009: Frontend plugin gating

Status: ACCEPTED
Date: 2026-07-10
Deciders: ShopDB maintainers
Supersedes: none

Context

The backend plugin system (ADR-002, ADR-003) lets an operator disable a plugin. Disabling it unregisters the plugin's API blueprint, drops its rows from global search (see test_search_disabled), and removes its entry from get_navigation_items(), so the disabled feature's sidebar link disappears.

The frontend told a different story. Every plugin's Vue routes and views ship inside the core bundle. frontend/src/router/index.js auto-discovers them with import.meta.glob('./routes/*.js'), so a route like /usb or /printers/3 is registered regardless of whether the owning backend plugin is enabled. A user who typed the URL, followed a stale bookmark, or clicked a cross-link reached a page whose API calls all 404, landing on a broken shell instead of a clean redirect. The navigation was already data-driven; direct-URL reachability was the gap.

There is no frontend plugin system yet. The product is packaged as one core Flask app plus backend-only plugins; the Vue app is monolithic and build-time static. Any gating has to live in core frontend code because that is the only place the plugin routes exist.

Decision

Step 1 (this ADR, implemented): route-level gating

Plugin-owned frontend routes are gated against the backend's enabled-plugin list. This is the whole of what ships now.

Enabled-list endpoint. A new GET /api/plugins/enabled (jwt_required(optional=True)) returns a flat JSON array of enabled plugin name strings and nothing else. It is a cheap registry read (registry.get_enabled_plugins()), no database access. Exposing it to anonymous callers is safe because GET /api/dashboard/navigation already leaks the same enabled/disabled signal, and unauthenticated kiosk routes (/tv) need the answer too. It carries no metadata, so it reveals strictly less than the equally-anonymous but metadata-carrying GET /api/plugins (also jwt_required(optional=True); only the PUT /api/plugins/<name> toggle is admin-gated).
Route tagging. Every plugin-owned route carries meta.plugin = '<pluginname>'. This covers the per-plugin route modules (routes/computers.js, routes/equipment.js, ...) and the plugin-owned routes that physically live in core files: the PC-relationships and toner reports, the slide manager and /tv dashboard (slides), the printer-QR and USB-label print pages, and the employee-detail page. Genuinely core routes (dashboard, search, map, applications, reference-data settings) stay untagged and are never gated.
Cached fetch, fail-open. A composable (composables/enabledPlugins.js) fetches the list exactly once behind a cached promise. If the fetch fails or returns a non-array, the code fails open: every plugin is treated as enabled. A transient API error must never brick navigation. The cost is that a disabled plugin's page is briefly reachable during an outage, which is acceptable because its API calls would fail anyway and the next successful fetch closes the gap.
Router guard. router.beforeEach awaits the cached fetch when the target route has meta.plugin. If that plugin is not enabled it redirects to / and raises an info toast. The endpoint is jwt-optional, so the guard works for both authenticated pages and the unauthenticated /tv kiosk route.

This is intentionally a thin layer. It does not change the plugin contract surface, so __contract_version__ does not move: adding a core HTTP endpoint and tagging core-shipped routes are not plugin-contract changes. Plugins still ship no frontend code of their own.

Non-goals for step 1

No build-time or runtime loading of plugin-authored Vue code.
No per-permission or per-role route gating (that stays with the existing requiresAuth / requiresAdmin meta flags).
No removal of disabled routes from the route table; they remain registered and are intercepted by the guard. Keeping them registered avoids a rebuild when a plugin is toggled and keeps the redirect path simple.

Future direction (PROPOSED, not implemented)

Step 1 gates routes that core already owns. The longer-term goal is a real frontend-plugin contract where a plugin ships its own frontend and core discovers it, mirroring the backend model. Sketch:

Plugin-owned frontend tree. Each plugin gains a plugins/<name>/frontend/ directory holding its route module, views, and any plugin-specific components. Core stops carrying views/usb, views/printers, and so on.
Build-time discovery. The Vite build discovers plugin frontends with a glob over plugins/*/frontend/routes.js (analogous to today's import.meta.glob('./routes/*.js')), so a plugin's presence in the tree is what puts its routes in the bundle. Combined with the step-1 enabled-list gate, a plugin that is absent from the build ships no code and a plugin that is present-but-disabled is route-gated at runtime.
Shared component + registration contract. Plugins register into named extension points instead of editing core files: an iconMap registration for nav/asset icons, asset-detail panels, map-marker renderers, and search-result renderers (the "Frontend hook contract" already listed as deferred in docs/ROADMAP.md). Core exposes a stable set of shared components (form controls, detail-page shells, table primitives) as the plugin frontend's only allowed core imports, the frontend analogue of the shopdb.api namespace.
Versioned frontend contract. The shared-component and registration surface would be versioned the same way the backend contract is (ADR-002), so a plugin frontend can declare the core frontend range it needs.

Tradeoffs of the future direction

Pro: true plugin self-containment; a site can drop in or remove a plugin (frontend and backend together) without patching core; smaller core; clearer ownership.
Con: significant build-system work (per-plugin Vite entry discovery, code-splitting, dev-server HMR across the plugin tree); a new versioned frontend contract to maintain and document; a migration that moves ten plugins' worth of views out of core; risk of a leaky shared-component surface becoming an accidental contract. The payoff only matters once external (out-of-tree) plugins with their own frontends are a real requirement. Until then, step 1's route gating delivers the user-visible correctness (no reachable dead pages) at a fraction of the cost.

Consequences

Disabling a backend plugin now makes its frontend routes redirect to the dashboard instead of loading a broken shell. Behavior matches the already-dynamic navigation.
One extra lightweight request at app boot (GET /api/plugins/enabled), cached for the session.
Fail-open means gating is a UX guardrail, not a security control. It is not a substitute for backend authorization: the API still enforces auth and the disabled plugin's endpoints are simply unregistered. Never rely on route gating to protect data.
The future frontend-plugin contract remains open work; this ADR records the direction and its cost so a later decision can pick it up.

7.4 KiB Raw Blame History