Replace the web UI's sign-in form with auth-gate states - #23

web-ui never authenticates anyone — the portal does, over OIDC — yet the SPA rendered a credential form for every 401.

In production that form could not sign anyone in. resolveIdentity ignores the webuiuser cookie once CORE_SIGNING_SECRET is set, so Continue POSTed to the portal, took a 401, and api() surfaced the server's raw string as the error text. The user saw the words "sign in" in red, with no way forward. The actual remedy was to reload, which nothing told them.

What changes

A surface that cannot authenticate anyone should render a state with one action, not a form — which is what the admin surface already does (plugins/admin/public/index.html:3776). And the server, not the client, decides which state applies.

• mode: "portal" | "dev" rides on the 401 and /me bodies, derived from one COOKIE_AUTH const that resolveIdentity itself now reads. Prod can no longer render the dev form.
• Portal — "Your session ended", one button to /auth/login carrying returnTo so the user lands back where they were. No field.
• Unreachable — "We couldn't reach the assistant" + Try again. This state did not exist: main.ts ended in a bare void boot() and boot() only special-cased exactly 401, so a 502 or a dropped connection was a blank page with a console error.
• Dev — keeps the field, but says why it exists and names the env var that turns it off. A DEV chip plus a persistent ochre top banner mark the instance as unauthenticated for as long as the session lasts, since the reason outlives the sign-in.

Net effect is less code: the form, its submit handler, and the POST /signin round-trip survive only on the dev path.

Adjacent fixes

Each of these would have left the change incoherent if skipped:

• Sign out in portal mode now calls /auth/logout. It was clearing a cookie the server ignores — a no-op in production, which would have looked especially broken next to a new "Your session ended" screen.
• POST /signin 404s outside cookie-auth mode instead of setting a cookie that gets ignored.
• A rejected principal gets a message naming WEB_UI_PRINCIPALS instead of not allowed.
• The boot warning about WEB_UI_PRINCIPALS no longer fires in portal mode, where no principal can cookie-sign-in at all.
• /signout added to vite's proxy list — a pre-existing gap found while testing; sign-out was silently broken on the standalone-vite dev path.
• .impersonation-banner generalises to .top-banner / .layout.bannered, now that the dev banner is a second caller.

Form mechanics, while in here: a real <label> instead of placeholder-as-label, type="email" with autocomplete="username" so password managers stop offering a password fill, role="alert" on the error, and a pending guard against double submits.

Screenshots

All five states captured against a running instance, with the env flipped to produce each one:

https://claude.ai/code/artifact/73ed970f-5f4c-4813-90c3-919eeb6b530c

Verification

Exercised live on localhost:8096 (real server, embedded vite): sign in → banner → sign out → gate; the 403 rejected-principal error; mode flipping to portal under CORE_SIGNING_SECRET; /signin 404ing outside dev; and Try again recovering once the server came back.

430 web-ui tests pass. Repo typecheck, both web-ui tsconfigs, and eslint clean.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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