Operators behind reverse proxies that don't reliably forward
X-Forwarded-Host / X-Forwarded-Proto / X-Forwarded-Prefix (manual
nginx setups, on-prem ingresses, custom-domain Fly deploys with
incomplete proxy chains) had no way to force the absolute base URL
the OAuth callback redirects from. The dashboard would reconstruct
the redirect_uri from request headers, the IDP would echo it back,
and the user would land on the wrong host or wrong path — 404.
Add `dashboard.public_url` to config.yaml with env override
HERMES_DASHBOARD_PUBLIC_URL. When set, it is the complete authority —
scheme + host + optional path prefix (e.g. https://example.com/hermes) —
and becomes the base for the OAuth `redirect_uri`. X-Forwarded-Prefix
is IGNORED on this code path because the operator has explicitly
declared the public URL; we no longer need to guess from proxy
headers, and stacking the prefix on top would double-prefix the
common case where the prefix is already baked into public_url.
When unset, the existing proxy_headers + X-Forwarded-Prefix
reconstruction runs untouched. Existing Fly.io deploys continue to
work without configuration — this is purely additive.
Precedence mirrors dashboard.oauth.client_id:
env (non-empty) > config.yaml > reconstructed from request
Implementation:
- hermes_cli/config.py: add dashboard.public_url to DEFAULT_CONFIG
with a multi-paragraph doc comment explaining the use case,
the X-Forwarded-Prefix interaction, and the validation rules.
- hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/prefix.py: factored out the existing
_REJECT_CHARS frozenset, added _normalise_public_url() validator
(requires http/https scheme + non-empty host + no header-injection
chars), _load_dashboard_section() loader (robust to load_config
raising, non-dict shapes), and resolve_public_url() entry point
with the env-overrides-config precedence. A malformed value
silently falls through to ""; the caller treats "" as "reconstruct
from request" so a typo never breaks the login flow.
- hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/routes.py: rewrite _redirect_uri()
docstring to spell out the three resolution tiers; add the
public_url short-circuit before the existing X-Forwarded-Prefix
splicing. Source-level comment notes that X-Forwarded-Prefix is
intentionally ignored when public_url is set so a future reader
doesn't try to "fix" the missing prefix layering.
- cli-config.yaml.example: extend the existing dashboard section
with a public_url block.
- website/docs/user-guide/features/web-dashboard.md: new "Public
URL override" section between the provider configuration and
the OAuth flow walkthrough. Documents the env-vs-config table,
the validation rules, and the `http://` `public_url` ↔ Secure
cookie footgun.
Test coverage — new TestPublicUrlOverride class (8 tests):
- env var overrides request reconstruction (the primary motivating
case)
- config.yaml used when env unset
- env wins over config (precedence pin)
- public_url with a path prefix already baked in (the Q1-a case the
user explicitly chose)
- public_url suppresses X-Forwarded-Prefix layering (defends
against the double-prefix bug)
- trailing slash stripped from public_url (no //auth/callback)
- malformed public_url falls through to reconstruction (six
hostile inputs: javascript:, ftp:, missing scheme, missing host,
quote chars, CRLF injection)
- empty env string doesn't shadow config.yaml entry (CI / Fly
provisioned-but-empty secret case)
Mutation-tested: flipping the precedence in resolve_public_url() trips
exactly test_env_overrides_config_public_url; weakening the validator
(accept any scheme) trips exactly test_malformed_public_url_falls_through_to_reconstruction.
Both other tests in each pair stay green, confirming the suite
discriminates the specific regression each test pins.
The login page is the first surface the user sees on a gated dashboard
and shipped with off-the-shelf system fonts and a generic orange
accent that didn't match the React dashboard waiting on the other
side of the OAuth round trip. Apply the same visual language the SPA
uses (the @nous-research/ui package) so the auth flow feels like one
product, not two.
What changes (visual only — no functional changes):
Typography
- Body: Collapse (regular + bold), served from /fonts/ — the same
woff2 files the dashboard SPA loads via the design-system's
fonts.css.
- Display: Rules Compressed (regular + medium) for the brand
wordmark and the page heading.
- Brand chrome (heading, buttons, footer) uses the DS idiom:
uppercase + letter-spacing 0.2em (matching the DS Button class).
Colour
- Background: #170d02 (deep brown-black; --background-base in DS).
- Accent: #ffac02 (amber; --midground in DS).
- Foreground: #ffffff.
- Hairlines: color-mix() of the midground at 18% / 35%, mirroring
the DS "@theme inline" derived tokens.
Button surface
- Solid amber surface with dark text, no rounded corners (DS Button
is squared). Inset bevel — — directly mirrors the DS
Button SHADOW_DEFAULT (). :active uses filter:invert(1) which matches the DS
Button's .
Atmosphere
- Subtle 3px dither (repeating-conic-gradient at 4% midground) +
a midground radial glow at top — same idioms as the DS .dither
utility and the SPA's panel chrome.
- slide-up fade-in entrance animation matching DS @keyframes
slide-up (0.6s ease-out). Honours prefers-reduced-motion.
Brand wordmark
- 'NOUS · RESEARCH' above the card in Rules Compressed, amber,
0.32em tracking. Establishes ownership before the user squints
at the buttons.
Empty-state page
- The 'Sign-in unavailable' fallback (no providers registered)
got the same colour-token and typography treatment so the
misconfigured-deploy experience is also coherent.
Fonts are served from /fonts/*.woff2 — a path the dashboard-auth gate
already allowlists pre-auth (see _GATE_PUBLIC_PREFIXES in
middleware.py:42), so the login page renders with the brand typeface
without needing the React bundle loaded. The page is still entirely
static HTML+CSS with no JS — the original constraint (no SPA
dependency, no session token) is preserved.
The class="provider-btn" selector is unchanged — the existing test
suite extracts the anchor href via that class, and a regression that
renamed it would silently break tests/hermes_cli/test_dashboard_auth_401_reauth.py.
A docstring note on the module flags this so future visual tweaks
don't break the contract by accident.
Visual smoke-test: rendered both the happy path (multiple providers
listed) and the empty-state page in a browser and verified all five
DS criteria — brown-black bg, amber accent, uppercase wide-tracking
type, inset-bevel buttons, Nous · Research wordmark — render
correctly with no unstyled fallbacks. 208/208 dashboard-auth tests
remain green.
Mission-control style deploys reverse-proxy the dashboard at a path
prefix (e.g. mission-control.tilos.com/hermes/* -> :9119) and inject
X-Forwarded-Prefix: /hermes on every request. The SPA mount already
honoured this for asset URLs and the bootstrap __HERMES_BASE_PATH__,
but the OAuth gate didn't:
1. The gate's Location: header to /login and the 401 envelope's
login_url were built bare ("/login?next=..."). Under a /hermes
prefix the browser follows that to mission-control.tilos.com/login
which the proxy doesn't route to the dashboard.
2. _redirect_uri (the OAuth callback URL handed to the IDP) used
request.url_for() which doesn't honour X-Forwarded-Prefix
(Starlette/uvicorn only proxy_headers Host + Proto + For). The
IDP redirects back to /auth/callback instead of /hermes/auth/
callback → 404 in the user's browser.
3. Cookies were set with Path=/ which leaks them to other apps on
the same origin and won't be sent back on requests under the
prefix in the first place.
Fix threads the normalised prefix through every boundary:
* New hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/prefix.py — single source of truth
for X-Forwarded-Prefix parsing. web_server._normalise_prefix
becomes a re-export so the SPA mount, the gate, and the cookies
helper all agree.
* middleware._unauth_response builds login_url = f"{prefix}/login".
* routes._redirect_uri splices the prefix into the path component
of the IDP-bound URL (with full validation of the header).
* cookies.{set,clear}_{session,pkce}_cookie now take prefix="".
Path attribute switches to /hermes when set; cookie name switches
name variant (see below). Every caller passes the request's
normalised prefix.
Cookie hardening (Teknium's lesser-note #1 in the PR review): adopt
the __Host- / __Secure- cookie name prefixes per draft-west-cookie-
prefixes. The variant is selected from (use_https, prefix):
* Loopback HTTP → bare "hermes_session_at" (both prefixes require
Secure, incompatible with HTTP).
* HTTPS, direct deploy (Path=/) → "__Host-hermes_session_at".
Strongest spec: bound to exact origin, no Domain attribute, Secure
required.
* HTTPS, behind a proxy prefix (Path=/hermes) →
"__Secure-hermes_session_at". __Host- forbids Path != "/"; the
explicit Path=/hermes covers same-origin app isolation.
Setter and reader BOTH consult the prefix because the cookie *name*
changes — a reader that looked up the bare name when the setter wrote
__Secure- would never find the value. The reader falls back across
all three variants so a request whose shape changed mid-session (e.g.
post-deploy from no-prefix to /hermes) still picks up the existing
cookie until it expires.
Test coverage:
- tests/hermes_cli/test_dashboard_auth_prefix.py — new file. 11 tests
pinning:
• Location: /hermes/login on the gate's HTML redirect
• 401 envelope login_url carries the prefix
• Malformed X-Forwarded-Prefix is ignored (header-injection
defence; the script-tag value is normalised to empty string)
• _redirect_uri splices /hermes into the path (the property
that prevents the IDP-returns-to-404 failure)
• PKCE cookie uses Path=/hermes + __Secure- when proxied
• Session cookies use __Host- when direct, __Secure- when
proxied, bare on loopback HTTP
• End-to-end round trip with hand-managed PKCE cookie carriage
(TestClient can't simulate a Path=/hermes cookie automatically)
- tests/hermes_cli/test_dashboard_auth_cookies.py — rewritten to pin
each (use_https, prefix) shape produces its expected cookie name,
plus reader-side coverage that __Host- and __Secure- variants are
both recognised.
- Existing tests across middleware / 401-reauth / etc. updated to
match the new cookie names (substring contains instead of
startswith).
Mutation-tested: reverting _unauth_response to build the bare
"/login" URL trips exactly the two tests that pin the prefix
carriage, confirming the suite discriminates the regression.
The gate's _unauth_response set next=<path> on the /login redirect URL,
but nothing downstream read it: render_login_html ignored next=,
auth_login dropped it, and auth_callback read next= from its own query
string — which an IDP never sets on the callback URL (real IDPs only
echo back code+state). The _validate_post_login_target plumbing in the
callback was unreachable on the happy path, so users always landed on
"/" regardless of what they originally requested.
Worse: reading next= from the callback URL was a latent open-redirect
sink, since an attacker could craft /auth/callback?...&next=/admin and
have the server honour it post-auth.
Fix carries next= through the round trip on a server-controlled channel:
1. login_page reads request.query_params['next'] and passes it (post-
validation) to render_login_html.
2. render_login_html threads next= URL-encoded into each provider
button's href, with HTML-attribute escaping as defence in depth.
3. auth_login accepts ?next= as a query param, re-validates, and
appends it as a fourth segment (next=<urlquoted>) in the PKCE
cookie payload alongside provider/state/verifier.
4. auth_callback no longer accepts a next: str = "" query param. It
parses next= out of the PKCE cookie and validates that with the
same same-origin rules. Any attacker-supplied ?next= on the
callback URL is silently ignored — server-only carrier.
Test coverage adds three classes:
- TestAuthCallbackNext drives /login → /auth/login → IDP-bounce →
/auth/callback end-to-end without smuggling next= onto the callback
URL (which is what the previous tests did and why they didn't
catch the bug). Includes test_attacker_callback_next_param_is_ignored
to pin the security property that the URL value is never read.
- TestRenderLoginHtmlNext covers the rendering function at the
unit boundary so a regression that drops next_path is caught
without spinning up the full app.
- TestAuthLoginPkceCookieNext inspects the Set-Cookie header on
/auth/login responses so a regression in cookie encoding is caught
without driving the full round trip.
Mutation-tested: reverting auth_callback to read next= from the URL
trips 3 of 6 TestAuthCallbackNext tests (the safe-path and attacker-
hardening ones), confirming the suite discriminates between the cookie
read and the URL read.
Contract V1 of nous-account-service PR #180 ships no refresh tokens, so
the original Phase 6 silent-refresh design is replaced with a thinner
'401 → redirect to /login' UX. The dashboard's gated middleware now
emits a structured envelope on any auth failure; the SPA's fetch
wrapper sees it and full-page-navigates the user through re-auth.
hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/cookies.py:
set_session_cookies(refresh_token='') SKIPS writing the
hermes_session_rt cookie. Forward-compat: a non-empty refresh_token
still emits the cookie unchanged, so a future Portal contract that
starts issuing RTs flips the persistence on with no other change.
clear_session_cookies still emits a Max-Age=0 deletion for the RT
cookie so stale cookies from earlier deployments get flushed on
logout / session expiry. Deprecation marker + rationale in
module docstring per the user's docstring-only deprecation pattern.
hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/middleware.py:
_unauth_response now builds a structured JSON envelope for API 401s:
{ error: 'session_expired' | 'unauthenticated',
detail: 'Unauthorized',
reason: <internal>,
login_url: '/login?next=<safe-path>' }
HTML redirects also carry next= so a user landing on /sessions
without a cookie bounces back to /sessions after re-auth.
_safe_next_target validates same-origin: drops protocol-relative
paths (//evil.com), absolute URLs, and any /login or /auth/* loop.
Dead cookies are cleared on the 401 path so the browser stops
replaying invalid tokens.
hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/routes.py:
/auth/callback accepts next= query param and validates via
_validate_post_login_target (same rules as the gate's
_safe_next_target — defence-in-depth because next= survived a full
IDP round trip and attacker-controlled state can re-enter via the
callback URL). Open-redirect attempts land at '/' instead.
web/src/lib/api.ts:
fetchJSON parses the 401 envelope and full-page-navigates to
body.login_url ONLY on the known session-expiry error codes.
Domain-level 401s (e.g. permission errors) bubble up as regular
errors. credentials: 'include' added so cookie auth works for all
fetches routed through this wrapper. sessionStorage.lastLocation is
preserved for future use by AuthWidget / hermes_status.
Test files marked with pytest.mark.xdist_group so the four files that
mutate web_server.app.state.auth_required serialize onto the same xdist
worker — eliminates 'works locally, fails in CI' app-state bleed.
20 new tests in test_dashboard_auth_401_reauth.py:
- set_session_cookies(refresh_token='') skips RT cookie
- clear_session_cookies still emits RT deletion
- 401 envelope shape (unauthenticated vs session_expired)
- dead cookie cleared on invalid-token 401
- login_url carries next= for deep paths
- login loop avoided when path is /login/auth/api-auth
- protocol-relative URL rejected
- _safe_next_target unit tests (accept same-origin, reject loops/abs)
- /auth/callback respects safe next= but rejects open redirects
2 pre-existing tests updated to accept the new /login?next=%2F shape.
Full dashboard-auth suite: 168 passed, 1 skipped (Phase 0 pre-existing).
Phase 5 task 5.1. Browsers cannot set Authorization on a WebSocket
upgrade, so in gated mode the SPA needs an alternative way to bind the
upgrade to its authenticated session.
hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/ws_tickets.py — in-memory single-use ticket
store with 30s TTL. Thread-safe (threading.Lock), token_urlsafe(32)
values, ticket value truncated to 8 chars in error messages for log
hygiene. Module-level state with _reset_for_tests() helper.
hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/routes.py — adds POST /api/auth/ws-ticket.
Auth-required (the gate middleware already attaches Session to
request.state.session). Returns {ticket, ttl_seconds}; emits
WS_TICKET_MINTED audit event with user_id + provider + ip.
hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/audit.py — adds WS_TICKET_REJECTED enum
value for the consume-side rejection event (wired into the WS
endpoints in task 5.2).
11 new tests covering round-trip, single-use, TTL boundary, unknown
ticket rejection, secret-hygiene truncation in error messages, and
concurrent mint+consume from 20 threads.
Phase 3, Tasks 3.2 + 3.3 + 3.4. These three pieces are mutually
dependent so they land together.
middleware.py - gated_auth_middleware engages when app.state.auth_required
is True. Allowlists /login, /auth/*, /api/auth/providers, and static
asset paths; everything else demands a valid session_at cookie. Verifies
by trying every registered provider's verify_session in turn (multi-
provider stack); attaches verified Session to request.state.session.
Returns 401 JSON for /api/* and 302 -> /login for HTML. ProviderError
during verify -> 503.
routes.py - APIRouter with:
GET /login server-rendered HTML
GET /auth/login?provider=N 302 to IDP + PKCE cookie
GET /auth/callback?code,state completes login, sets session cookies
POST /auth/logout clears cookies + best-effort revoke
GET /api/auth/providers public bootstrap endpoint (503 if zero)
GET /api/auth/me verified session as JSON (auth-required)
login_page.py - Inline-CSS HTML template, no React, no JavaScript.
web_server.py - Mounted gated_auth_middleware between host_header and
auth_middleware (FastAPI runs middlewares in registration order: host
check -> cookie auth -> token auth). auth_middleware short-circuits
when auth_required so cookie auth is authoritative in gated mode.
Router is included before mount_spa so the catch-all doesn't swallow
/login or /auth/*.
17 new behavioural tests; loopback regression harness still green.
Phase 3, Task 3.1. Three cookies:
- hermes_session_at: OAuth access token (HttpOnly, TTL = token TTL)
- hermes_session_rt: OAuth refresh token (HttpOnly, 30d max-age)
- hermes_session_pkce: PKCE state + verifier + provider hint (10min)
All SameSite=Lax + Path=/. Secure flag is set ONLY when the request
scheme is https — uvicorn proxy_headers=True (enabled in gated mode at
Phase 3.5) rewrites scheme from X-Forwarded-Proto so Fly's TLS
terminator works.
Phase 1, Task 1.4. Records every auth event (login start/success/failure,
logout, refresh success/failure, revoke, session verify failure, WS
ticket mint) as one JSON object per line. Token-like kwargs (access_token,
refresh_token, code, code_verifier, state, ticket, cookie, Authorization)
are dropped before serialisation so the log never contains live secrets.
Write failures log at WARNING but never raise — auth flows must not fail
because the audit logger broke.
Phase 1, Task 1.1. New package hermes_cli/dashboard_auth/ contains:
base.py - DashboardAuthProvider ABC with 5 abstract methods
(start_login, complete_login, verify_session,
refresh_session, revoke_session), Session + LoginStart
frozen dataclasses, three exception types
(ProviderError / InvalidCodeError / RefreshExpiredError),
and assert_protocol_compliance() for plugins to call
in their own tests.
registry.py - Module-level register/get/list/clear with a lock.
Nothing reads the registry yet — Phase 2 adds the StubAuthProvider and
Phase 3 wires the gate middleware. The plugin hook lands in Task 1.3.
