Opening user management on cloud (623ad68) left a managed tenant able to
create staff accounts without limit. This is the other half, and the two
belong in the same release.
max_clients and max_staff_users are numbers the platform sells and does
not enforce — grep finds them only being passed to screens. The
application is the only process that can count against them, so it
accepts the number from the environment and refuses to exceed it. That is
not the same as inventing a plan tier, which is what config/api.php
declines to do when it will not key a rate limit off billing: nothing
here knows what a plan is.
## One definition
staffUsed() and clientUsed() are public and are what the guards read. A
control plane showing "2 of 3 used" from its own query, beside an
application refusing the fourth from a different one, disagrees
eventually — over an inactive account, or a deleted one — and the
disagreement reads as a billing fault rather than a counting one.
## What counts, and the consequences somebody has to explain
An inactive staff account occupies its seat. Excluding it would make
deactivation a way around the cap rather than a way to revoke access,
since reactivating is one click. The cost is an awkward incentive —
deactivating is the safe removal and keeps paying, deleting frees the
seat and asks what happens to the files — and it is better explained than
hidden.
A client awaiting approval does not. Self-registration is open to
strangers, and counting a pending request would let anybody exhaust a
paid limit from the outside, turning a pricing tier into an availability
control. The seat is spent at approval, which is where the guard sits.
A soft-deleted account frees its seat, though not its address —
AvailableEmailRule holds that until erasure. So a seat can be free while
re-adding the same person is still refused, which is the address rule
rather than this one.
## Eight doors, eight tests
There is no single User::create() to guard. StaffAccounts::create()
covers both staff controllers, but a promotion takes a staff seat without
creating anything, a demotion takes a client seat, ClientProvisioning
serves registration and LDAP and social sign-in alike, and approval turns
an uncounted request into a counted client.
A cap is only a cap if every door asks, so there is a test per door and
each was verified to fail without its guard — eight red, with the two
"must not change" cases green either way. DownloadAllowance's shape for
DownloadAllowance's reason: the failure mode is one of them quietly not
asking, invisible from everywhere except the door that forgot.
projectsend:admin is deliberately uncapped and has a test saying so. It
is the recovery path, and anyone who can run it can also edit the
environment the cap comes from.
Every route that binds one client — the edit screen, the update, the
delete, the second-factor reset, the file browser — asks whether this
staff member may manage that client. POST users/convert/{user} binds one
too, and asks nothing about it.
AccountConversion::guardToStaff() says why it skips
StaffAccounts::guardTarget, and the reason is sound as far as it goes:
guardTarget asks "could the actor have granted the target's role", which
is meaningless of a client, and what limits a promotion is the role being
*granted* — enforced by the controller validating role_id against
assignableRoleIds(). That answers the question about the role. Nothing
answers the one about the target.
So a client-scoped staff member holding manage_users, edit_users and
edit_clients could promote any client on the installation. It is the
most far-reaching thing that can be done to a client account: the portal
access goes, the assignments that made them somebody's client go inert,
and they come out holding whatever staff role the actor picked from
their own list. The client is never told.
guardToStaff() now asks StaffLibraryScope::canAssignClient — the same
predicate ResolvesShareTargets uses to decide who a file may be shared
with, and true by construction for unscoped staff, so the ordinary
administrator path is untouched. 404 rather than 403, matching both the
isClient() check the controller makes on the way in and the answer the
clients routes give: a client this staff member may not manage should
not be distinguishable from one that is not there.
guardToClient() is unchanged. Its target is a staff account, guardTarget
is the right question to ask about one, and it was already being asked.
The account list on the converter screen is deliberately left as it is.
It runs under can:edit_users and shows every account of the chosen
direction, the same way every other staff surface that lists clients
shows all of them; narrowing a listing is a product decision, not this
fix. What changes is that the button on the row now refuses rather than
going through.
Client file sharing, rebuilt from the ground up: a private area per
client, resumable uploads, folders, groups and categories, sharing with
expiry dates and download limits, comments, file versions, an activity
log, a REST API, and sixteen languages.
This repository begins here. ProjectSend 2 was developed privately, and
that development history is not published — the previous generation
remains available, with its own history, at projectsend/legacy.
Free software under the GNU General Public License v2, or (at your
option) any later version.
ignacionelson