`fetch` decompresses a response body before anyone sees it, and the headers it returns still say `content-encoding: gzip`. Copying those onto the decoded bytes tells the client to gunzip plain JSON: `Decompression error: ZlibError`, which surfaced as a 502 from the catch that wraps the forward. It hides well, and that is the part worth writing down. A 401 body is a few bytes and is not compressed, so every unauthenticated probe passes. The first request carrying a real credential is the first one big enough to be gzipped, and the first one to fail - which reads as "the credential broke it". Measured on alpha in exactly that order: the extension door answered 401 without a token and 502 with one. `content-length` goes too. It describes the compressed length and the body being handed on is not that length. Response headers are now a different function from request headers, because they are a different question and treating them as one is what caused this.
Linkwarden
Your bookmarks, behind an Officer session. One self-hosted Linkwarden per Officer install, pointed at by the owner, with every Officer user mapped onto an account of their own.
Officer stores no bookmarks. Linkwarden owns those. What this plugin owns is the credential and the door.
The model
It is the Vault model, and deliberately so:
| One instance per install | linkwarden_config, one row pinned by a CHECK, set in the panel. Not .env — a plugin cannot ask the owner to edit a file and restart a process. |
| A sidecar owns the upstream | officer-linkwarden reads the URL from Postgres with a short TTL and reverse-proxies. Nothing else knows where Linkwarden is. |
| Two doors | An authenticated one for Officer's own UI, which injects the mapped user's token so the device never holds one. And /api/linkwarden/lw, unauthenticated, for the browser extension — which carries its own credential and has nowhere to put an Officer JWT. |
| A mapped account per user | linkwarden_accounts. This is the part Vault does not have; its schema says so outright. Provisioning follows ../USER_PROVISIONING.md. |
The one thing that is not like Vault
Vaultwarden speaks a host-agnostic bearer protocol. Linkwarden is a Next.js app using NextAuth.
That difference is the whole of the difficulty. NextAuth issues host-scoped session cookies, checks CSRF
against the host, and hands clients absolute URLs built from NEXTAUTH_URL. Measured on the live
instance rather than inferred — a sign-in posted to 100.64.0.1:3000 answers with:
{"url":"https://linkwarden.home.pastilhas.eu/api/v1/auth/signin?csrf=true"}
So serving the extension through Officer requires NEXTAUTH_URL to name the address Officer serves it
at. That is a change to the container, not to this plugin, and it is a prerequisite rather than a
preference: leave it and the extension is bounced out of the proxy mid-login, to a host that in this case
does not even answer.
The API half is unaffected. /api/v1/* accepts Authorization: Bearer <access token> and never touches
NextAuth, so the panel — and anything an agent does — works either way. Only the extension's login
depends on it.
Verified against the live instance
Linkwarden v2.16.2, 2026-09-05. Every status below was observed, not read in a doc.
| Route | Without a token | With a token |
|---|---|---|
/api/v1/dashboard |
401 | 200 |
/api/v1/collections |
401 | 200 |
/api/v1/tags |
401 | 200 |
/api/v1/links |
401 | 200 |
/api/v1/users |
401 | 200 — the admin surface, used for provisioning |
Shapes worth knowing before reading the code:
- collections — nested through
parentId, withisPublic,ownerIdandmembers. - tags — paginated,
{ tags, nextCursor }, unlike the others. - links — carry the archive:
textContentandreadable(extracted text), pluspreview,image,pdfandmonolith, withlastPreserved.textContentis the reason this is worth more than a bookmark bar: it makes a saved link something that can be searched and quoted rather than re-opened.
State
Foundation only. manifest.ts, db/schema.ts and this file. The sidecar, the routers, provisioning and
the panel are not written yet.