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coder/coderd/httpmw
Ethan c1474c7ee2 fix(coderd/httpmw): return 500 for internal auth errors (#23352)
## Issue context
On `dev.coder.com`, users could successfully log in, briefly see the web
UI, and then get redirected back to `/login`.

We traced the most reliable repro to viewing Tracy's workspaces on the
`/workspaces` page. That page eagerly issues authenticated per-row
requests such as:
- `POST /api/v2/authcheck`
- `GET /api/v2/workspacebuilds/:workspacebuild/parameters`

One confirmed failing request was for Tracy's workspace
`nav-scroll-fix-1f6b`:
- route: `GET
/api/v2/workspacebuilds/f2104ae6-7d53-457c-a8df-de831bee76db/parameters`
- build owner/workspace: `tracy/nav-scroll-fix-1f6b`

The failing response body was:
- message: `An internal error occurred. Please try again or contact the
system administrator.`
- detail: `Internal error fetching API key by id. fetch object: pq:
password authentication failed for user "coder"`

That showed the request was not actually unauthorized. The server hit an
internal database/authentication problem while resolving the session API
key. The underlying issue was that DB password rotation had been
enabled, it has since been disabled.

However, the logout cascade happened because:
1. `APIKeyFromRequest()` returned `ok=false` for both genuine auth
failures and internal backend failures.
2. `ValidateAPIKey()` wrapped every `!ok` result as `401 Unauthorized`.
3. `RequireAuth.tsx` signs the user out on any `401` response.

So a transient backend/database failure was being misreported as an auth
failure, which made the client forcibly log the user out.

A useful extra clue was that the installed PWA did not repro. The PWA
starts on `/agents`, which avoids the `/workspaces` request fan-out.
That helped narrow the problem to the eager authenticated requests on
the workspace list rather than to cookies or the login flow itself.

## What changed
This PR now fixes the bug without changing the exported
`APIKeyFromRequest()` surface:
- `ValidateAPIKey()` now uses a new internal helper that returns a typed
`ValidateAPIKeyError`
- the exported `APIKeyFromRequest()` helper remains compatible for
existing callers like `userauth.go`
- internal API-key lookup failures are classified as `500 Internal
Server Error` plus `Hard: true`
- internal `UserRBACSubject()` failures now return `500 Internal Server
Error` instead of `401 Unauthorized`
- a focused regression test verifies that an internal `GetAPIKeyByID`
failure surfaces as `500`

This removes the brittle message-based classification and makes the
internal-auth-failure path robust for all API-key lookup failures
handled by auth middleware.
2026-03-24 12:37:17 +11:00
..