From Backend to Breach-Aware Part 0: The Router That Was Built
Dine Flow was a six-person cohort project, a restaurant inventory and order-management platform, built in about six weeks. Six people means six sets of hands in the codebase, and I want to be specific about which hands built what, rather than let a team project blur into a vague personal credit. My piece was the Express/API backend: the routers and the backend logic for stock, menu items, and…
The stock router, built by the reporter for the Dine Flow project, manages restaurant inventory. It handles ingredients, expiration dates, suppliers, and orders. The router has two main endpoints: GET / for retrieving full inventory and GET /: id for fetching a specific stock item. POST / allows creating a new stock order, calculating expiration dates, and determining if a supplier API URL exists.
If not, it creates a stock record and a matching expense record. If yes, it triggers an automated reorder request to the supplier's API. The reporter discovered a bug where the GET /: id endpoint returned the entire stock table instead of the requested item. They fixed this by referencing the correct field for the ID variable. The design decision to create a new row for each delivery rather than updating an existing record ensures accurate tracking of aging batches.
The reporter emphasizes the importance of verifying responses and not solely relying on a clean-looking result. They discovered a similar bug in the GET /: id endpoint that returns a 200 with null data for non-existent IDs. The reporter plans to expand this series with security-focused work, including dependency, static-analysis, and secrets scanning in the CI pipeline.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
