With more than one admin, every setting in the panel was editable by all of
them — prompts, model policy, retrieval budgets, SMTP, email templates.
ADMIN_LOCKDOWN separates running the service from changing how it behaves.
It is an environment variable on purpose: a setting could be switched off by
the very admin it restrains, so lifting this needs host access and a restart.
The server is the control. One gate refuses configuration writes rather than
a check in each of the fifteen write routes, because that list grows and a
route added later would quietly miss it. Reads always pass — lockdown hides
nothing. Day-to-day operation stays available: invitations, announcements,
registration, feature flags, and the test endpoints, which persist nothing.
A setting invented later is locked until someone deliberately makes it
editable, rather than defaulting to open.
The panel disables what it cannot save and says why, but that is courtesy;
the refusal is what enforces it.
Two things this taught me, both fixed: my first version painted the panel
from an IIFE, which the module conventions forbid, and fetched the whole
config a second time just to read one flag — breaking the test that pins
admin loaders firing exactly once. The state now rides on the invites
response the panel already requests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Dv6sqaY6Vq3ChZHMem3cnU
272ea94768