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school_compare/backend/config.py
TudorandClaude Opus 5 0fa1a292c7
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fix(api): bound what a forged CF-Connecting-IP can buy
Code review, both findings valid.

The design doc claimed Cloudflare "replaces the header, so a browser
cannot forge it", and that only the X-Forwarded-For fallback was
forgeable. That is true only for traffic that actually passed through
Cloudflare, and nothing in this process can verify that it did. Reaching
the origin directly, both headers are equally attacker-controlled — and
rotating CF-Connecting-IP mints a fresh rate-limit bucket per request,
defeating per-client limits on every endpoint including the
DataFrame-heavy /api/schools. Against abuse that is worse than the
shared bucket it replaced, which at least capped everyone together.

So the ceiling comes back. I dropped it earlier arguing it belonged at
Cloudflare; that argument assumed the keying was sound, and it is not.
GlobalRateLimitMiddleware counts all /api/ traffic in a fixed window
against a total, independent of client identity, outermost so it refuses
before any work happens. Written by hand because slowapi cannot express
a global cap: default_limits and application_limits are both keyed by
key_func, and the latter needs middleware this app does not install.

It does not make the header trustworthy — it makes trusting it
survivable. The real fix is Authenticated Origin Pulls or an origin
firewall, now documented in DEPLOY.md as the open gap it is.

127.0.0.1 is exempt: the healthcheck curls localhost from inside the
container, and starving it would restart the container and turn a load
spike into an outage loop. Keyed on the peer address, never the Host
header, which the caller sets.

Second finding: suggest_schools_typesense promised "never raises" while
the parsing loop sat outside the try, so int(None) on a malformed
document would have made a keystroke a 500. The loop now skips bad rows
rather than dropping the whole list — and a hit with no document no
longer becomes a suggestion pointing at /school/0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
2026-08-26 20:56:32 +01:00

72 lines
2.4 KiB
Python

"""
Application configuration using pydantic-settings.
Loads from environment variables and .env file.
"""
import secrets
from pathlib import Path
from typing import List, Optional
from pydantic_settings import BaseSettings
from pydantic import Field
class Settings(BaseSettings):
"""Application settings loaded from environment."""
# Paths
data_dir: Path = Path(__file__).parent.parent / "data"
frontend_dir: Path = Path(__file__).parent.parent / "frontend"
# Server
host: str = "0.0.0.0"
port: int = 80
debug: bool = False # Set to False in production
# Database
database_url: str = "postgresql://schoolcompare:schoolcompare@localhost:5432/schoolcompare"
# CORS - Production should only allow the actual domain
allowed_origins: List[str] = ["https://schoolcompare.co.uk"]
# API
default_page_size: int = 50
max_page_size: int = 100
# Security
admin_api_key: str = Field(default_factory=lambda: secrets.token_urlsafe(32))
rate_limit_per_minute: int = 60 # Requests per minute per IP
# A ceiling on total /api/ traffic, independent of any client identity.
# client_key trusts headers only Cloudflare can vouch for, so a caller
# reaching the origin directly could otherwise mint a fresh bucket per
# request. See GlobalRateLimitMiddleware in backend/app.py.
global_rate_limit_per_minute: int = 3000
rate_limit_burst: int = 10 # Allow burst of requests
max_request_size: int = 1024 * 1024 # 1MB max request size
# Typesense
typesense_url: str = "http://localhost:8108"
typesense_api_key: str = ""
# Feature flags (Unleash). An empty unleash_url disables flags entirely and
# every flag evaluates False — the correct behaviour for local development
# and CI, and the reason no test needs a running Unleash.
unleash_url: str = ""
unleash_api_token: str = ""
unleash_app_name: str = "schoolcompare-backend"
# On a named volume, so a restart during an Unleash outage keeps
# last-known state instead of reverting a released feature to dark.
unleash_cache_directory: str = "/app/.unleash"
# Analytics
ga_measurement_id: Optional[str] = "G-J0PCVT14NY" # Google Analytics 4 Measurement ID
class Config:
env_file = ".env"
env_file_encoding = "utf-8"
extra = "ignore"
# Singleton instance
settings = Settings()