- PRODUCTION_BRANCH defaulted to `production`, a branch this repo does not have (development is the
table, main is production). compose.yaml and every deployment already set main; a platform deploy
that left it unset watched a missing branch and /cdn never built. Default main in build-cdn.sh,
pb-prod-migrations.sh and admin.mjs, and in the README.
- EMBED_BASE_URL was missing from the settings table. Unset, the published snippets stay relative.
- Open mode is for a laptop or a private network: it has none of the public mode's guards. Said so.
- compose.yaml reads the repo-root .env, the same file bun run dev reads, so laptop-only settings
would reach the container. Said so in compose.yaml and the platform table.
No Vite, no pull loop and no Rudder: /cdn, PocketBase, the admin router and the sign-in stay, and / redirects to
/cdn/. The default stays on, so running containers are unchanged. Off without OIDC_ISSUER refuses to start,
because /pb and /admin would then have nothing in front of them.
Replayed onto development after the public Studio mode landed. Off together with ACCESS=public is refused
too, because the public Studio is the dev server itself. PULL_INTERVAL=0 still means no pulls, whatever
DEV_SERVER says. The setting is in the cloud README's table.
/pb already refused them to anyone who is not an admin. /api-prod, the production PocketBase's
public API, passed every /api/ path, so its superuser sign-in was reachable from the public side:
no data was exposed, but it was a place to guess the production admin's password. Now any
/api-prod/api/collections/_… path is refused (403), checked on the decoded path like the /pb gate.
No public client calls these; the one caller in the repo (pb-oidc.mjs) talks to PocketBase directly.
Found by dx-base's independent review of the public Studio (V2).
The container needed an OIDC provider to run PocketBase at all. With ACCESS=public:
- The Studio, every map and the backend's public API are open, with no sign-in. Vite owns
the public port and forwards /cdn/, /api-prod/, /pb/ and /admin/ to admin.mjs, whose gates
decide.
- /admin/ (publishing), PocketBase's dashboard and _superusers ask for ADMIN_USER /
ADMIN_PASSWORD over HTTP Basic, compared in constant time. The container refuses to start
without ADMIN_PASSWORD. In this mode X-Forwarded-Groups is never read: with no oauth2-proxy
in front, it is whatever a visitor sends.
- Rudder's voice engine stays off. Gated bundles (gatedProfiles) are refused even by URL:
source, @fs, dev leaf. Vite's /__open-in-editor is refused.
OIDC stays the other mode, unchanged. In BOTH modes the Studio's own /api/pb (the dev backend
plugin) now goes through admin.mjs's /pb (DX_PB_URL). The dashboard and _superusers stay
behind the same gates, and plugins that use PocketBase work in the container's Studio; they
got a 503 before.
Checked: bash -n; the mode selection (public / gated / open); a missing password stops the
container. The admin gate and the public guard, taken from these files, pass 20/20:
- password right / wrong / wrong user;
- a spoofed groups header ignored;
- 401 + Basic prompt;
- gated mode unchanged;
- no password = no admin;
- every form of a gated path refused and the rest passed.
Two holes studio found in admin.mjs, there since 2026-09-27:
- proxy() parsed the remaining path as a URL. /pb//evil.example/x is a protocol-relative URL, so
admin.mjs fetched ANOTHER host (any internal address too) with the visitor's own headers, and
returned its body. The path now goes onto a fixed http://127.0.0.1:<port> origin and is never
parsed as a URL, and a path starting with // is refused.
- The /pb/_/ and _superusers checks tested the raw path, so /pb/%5F/ and
/pb/api/collections/%5Fsuperusers/... passed them, and PocketBase decoded them to the real
thing. The checks now run on the decoded, slash-collapsed path. Encoded slashes or
backslashes, and undecodable input, get 400.
Reach today: maps-dev answers all four attack paths with its sign-in page to an anonymous
visitor (measured), so a signed-in team member could use them. In ACCESS=public they would
be anonymous; that mode is held until this lands.
Checked both ways against a PocketBase-like upstream plus an "evil" host. The old code let
/pb/%5F/, %5Fsuperusers and %2F through, fetched http://_/ and hit the evil host once. The new
code refuses them (403/400) with 0 evil hits, and health and records calls still pass.
Three bugs rega found on a laptop run of the container (2026-09-29):
- /pb/_/ never rendered. admin.mjs proxied with fetch(), which returns the body decompressed,
but forwarded PocketBase's Content-Encoding: gzip and Content-Length, so the browser tried to
gunzip plain HTML. The proxy now drops both headers (for /pb and /api-prod).
- PocketBase's own redirects left the mount: /pb/_ went to /_/, and /pb/_/index.html to
http://127.0.0.1:8090/_/ (the internal address). Root-relative and upstream-absolute
locations are put back under the mount: /pb/_/.
- The research host's /embed-test set no MAP_APP_API_URL, so the maps asked that static host's
own /api (404s; dashboard-plus-grid drew 489 nodes, not 1,399). The page now sets it from the
manifest's runtime.apiBaseUrl before any bundle loads, as every generated page does.
Checked both ways against an upstream that answers like PocketBase (gzipped HTML, redirects
to /_/). The old proxy sends a gzip label on a plain body and /_/ locations; the new one
sends a decodable body and /pb/_/.
pb-prod (the public API) ran the migrations in the pulled checkout, which follows the table (development), so a
restart moved production's schema to unpublished work. It now reads /data/pb-prod-migrations/current: a snapshot
of PRODUCTION_BRANCH's migrations taken at start (the ref build-cdn.sh uses) and refreshed from the very snapshot
a publish builds. Only a change restarts pb-prod, and the restart is local: pb-prod runs in a loop, so the
container stays up. It fails closed: an error keeps the last good snapshot, and with none it is an empty folder,
never the development checkout. --automigrate=false, so a change made in prod's dashboard writes no migration.
/admin/status shows prodSchema next to published.
SUBDOMAIN_APPS=host=bundle/profile makes e.g. research-gallery.<domain> serve the /cdn build of
doxa-maps-spa at its root. A separate server on its own port answers only those hosts and only with
published /cdn files (no admin, PocketBase or dev server behind it), so no sign-in is skipped anywhere
else. The root page gets a <base href> at the plugin's real folder, so its relative links resolve as on /cdn.
main is the shared sandbox the dev server follows; /cdn is built only from PRODUCTION_BRANCH (default
production), which moves when someone promotes: git push origin main:production. The container watches
that branch and rebuilds /cdn once it has held a new commit for CDN_AUTOBUILD_MINUTES (default 2; 0 = the
admin button only); a failed commit is not retried automatically. The build fetches the branch into its
own ref (never touching the dev server's FETCH_HEAD) and uses that commit's own exclusion list, so
loosening it takes a promotion too. DEPLOY.md documents the promote step.
/admin/pb-signin-check (behind the site sign-in) signs in to pb-dev through the team account, with the
same realtime flow as the PocketBase SDK, and shows the email and groups it sees, or the exact refusal.
The token is never stored.
Laptops reach pb-dev's API without the site sign-in; PocketBase signs people in itself through the same
OIDC provider (its own client), members of OIDC_ALLOWED_GROUPS only, password sign-in off. The group check
is ONE hook baked into the image and pinned by SHA-256; hooks from the pulled repo still never run. The
dashboard, _superusers and system collections stay behind the site sign-in for admins. It fails closed:
without the baked gate or a working OIDC setup, /pb/ stays behind the site sign-in as before.
deployment/cloud: PocketBase (pinned, sha256-checked) as dev (/pb/, signed in; its /_/ dashboard for
OIDC_ADMIN_GROUPS only) and prod (/api-prod/api/ public, dashboard never exposed), with the schema
as migrations in backend/pocketbase/pb_migrations and data on the /data volume; superuser from env.
admin.mjs routes /cdn/, /api-prod/, /pb/ and /admin/ behind oauth2-proxy (public: /cdn/ and
/api-prod/api/ only). build-cdn.sh: flock (409 on a second build), a snapshot of the pulled commit,
the public exclusions applied BEFORE the build, a heap-capped build, a check of the output that
REFUSES the swap if anything excluded remains (proved with planted fixtures: a field-access file,
'Visa Requirements' content, and key-cities one level down each fail; clean passes), then an atomic
swap; runtime-config.js carries the public API URL. public-exclusions.txt is the ONE list the
giveaway export and the CDN build share. Any git host via REPO_URL/BRANCH/GIT_TOKEN.
