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serve-instrument exits when an instrument directory is deleted or a request URL has a malformed percent-escape

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
82/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
node.js, typescript
Domain
backend, testing

Research direction

Start with packages/serve-instrument/src/server.tsx at the watcher callback, updateEncodedBundle, request handler, and URL decoding points named in the issue. Then read packages/serve-instrument/src/__tests__/server.test.ts and run the focused tests. Done when the deletion and malformed-URL cases return the expected responses without stopping the server or disrupting other instruments.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Area: Instruments Bug Difficulty: Low Good First Issue Priority: Low

serve-instrument exits with an unhandled error when an instrument directory is deleted or renamed while it runs, or when it receives a URL with a malformed percent-escape. In both cases an exception escapes an async function that is called with void: this.handler.handle(...) for requests, and this.updateEncodedBundle() in the fs.watch callback. Node turns the unhandled rejection into a process exit. In updateEncodedBundle, only the bundle() call is inside the try; the readdir/readFile before it are not. In --all mode, deleting or renaming one instrument folder kills the server for all the others, and so does a git checkout that removes one. An author has to notice that the terminal died and restart it.

Where

packages/serve-instrument/src/server.tsx:45-48, 62-79 and 243-247, 312:

    this.watcher = fs.watch(target, { recursive: false }, () => {
      // ...
      void this.updateEncodedBundle();
    });
// ...
  private async updateEncodedBundle(): Promise<void> {
    const inputs: BundlerInput[] = [];
    const filepaths = await fs.promises
      .readdir(this.target, 'utf-8')
      // ...
    for (const filepath of filepaths) {
      const loader = inferLoader(filepath);
      const content: string | Uint8Array = await fs.promises.readFile(filepath, /* ... */);
      // ...
    }
    const start = Date.now();
    try {
// ...
      const decodedName = decodeURIComponent(name!);
// ...
    this.server = http.createServer((...args) => void this.handler.handle(...args));

Reproduce

  1. Build it (pnpm --filter @opendatacapture/serve-instrument build) and run node dist/cli.js --all <dir> on a directory containing forms/FOO/index.ts and forms/BAR/index.ts.
  2. Open /forms/BAR, then rm -rf <dir>/forms/BAR.
    Actual: ↺ [forms/BAR] File changed, rebuilding..., then Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, scandir '…/forms/BAR' and the process exits (verified on main). /forms/FOO is no longer served.
  3. Restart, then curl 'http://localhost:3000/forms/%E0%A4%A'.
    Actual: URIError: URI malformed at decodeURIComponent and the process exits (verified on main).

Expected: the server logs the failure and keeps running. A deleted instrument answers 404 and a malformed URL answers 400.

Tests

packages/serve-instrument/src/__tests__/server.test.ts:

  • it('should keep serving other instruments after an instrument directory is deleted, so a rebuild failure does not kill the server'): fire the captured watch callback after removing the temp directory, and assert that the remaining instrument still returns 200.
  • it('should answer 400 to a malformed percent-escape in an instrument URL rather than crashing')

No e2e test applies: serve-instrument is not part of the stack under testing/.

Suggested fix

Move the directory listing and file reads inside the existing try in updateEncodedBundle. Wrap handle in Server's request callback with a .catch that logs the error and ends the response with 500 if headers are not yet sent. Map a URIError from decodeURIComponent to 400.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
119
Forks
19
Avg merge
1d 4h
Merged PRs (30d)
44

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