The boot readiness probe calls the credential-free /api/health, and only a
404 flips it to the /api/status fallback. Both halves are wrong against a
gated gateway.
/api/health landed in ccab46ca4 (2026-07-24), after the v2026.7.20 tag, so
every container pinned to a release lacks the route. On those backends the
dashboard auth gate runs ahead of the SPA catch-all, so an unknown /api/*
path is rejected as unauthenticated rather than 404 — a credential-free
probe can never observe the 404 that the fallback keys on, and boot loops
until the 45s deadline reporting a healthy backend as "did not become
ready". Upgrading the backend is not a workaround for release-pinned
deployments.
Simulating a 0.19.0 backend (both the route and its PUBLIC_API_PATHS entry
removed, since ccab46ca4 added the two together) shows the probe's 401 means
two different things depending on whether credentials were sent:
credential-free: /api/health -> 401 no_cookie, /api/status -> 200
credentialed: /api/health -> 404, /api/sessions -> 200
So the fix is not "fall back on any 401". Uncredentialed, a gate-shaped 401
identifies a missing route and must fall back. Credentialed, a 401/403 is a
rejected session and must fail fast — falling back would hit the public
/api/status, get a 200, and report a dead session as ready, deferring the
no_cookie to the first real API call.
Split the two cases and tag the credentialed rejection as a terminal reauth
error. A generic 401 without the gate shape, plus 429 and 5xx, keep polling
as before.
Desktop boot polls /api/status, so readiness waits on gateway config and a
cold plugin import tree. On Windows that regularly outlives the probe and
Desktop kills a backend that is already listening, respawns it, and re-pays
the same import cost — the reported crash loop.
Probe /api/health instead, falling back to /api/status only for the
missing-route shapes the fetch helpers emit (404, or HTML from the SPA), so
an older remote backend still connects. Timeouts and server errors keep
polling health rather than dropping to the heavyweight route.
A cheap route is not enough on its own. Warming the gateway import holds the
GIL, so the event loop can stall for tens of seconds and starve /api/health
too. At the default 15s socket timeout only three attempts fit in the 45s
budget; give each probe 5s so the loop keeps retrying across the stall.
Co-authored-by: webtecnica <75556242+webtecnica@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: DESXIE <78300229+DESXIE@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: frohsinnllc <231045016+frohsinnllc@users.noreply.github.com>
hermes-seaeye[bot]
Brooklyn Nicholson
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