Is password reset construct_url patch still needed?

[mauritsvanrees]

I have setup a fresh Plone site with cookieplone and deployed it on a test server.

• Volto 18.0.0-alpha.42
• Plone 6.0.12

When I create a user, the password reset mail contains a link like
http://localhost:3000/passwordreset/4e972ab4b223413cbe3885ae6eec7d51?userid=maurits

I would expect the live domain instead of localhost. Yes, I tried this on the live server, not locally.

I found out there is a Volto Settings panel where you can set a frontend domain, and this is by default set to http://localhost:3000

If you fill in a / as value and submit, Volto sends this to the backend with the full domain url. Then a password reset works.
The alternative is to set en environment variable VOLTO_FRONTEND_DOMAIN in the backend, with the full domain including https.
This probably should be in documentation somewhere, but I could not find it.

The settings field is used in a construct_url patch in plone.volto. But when locally I go in with a pdb, I see that the frontend_domain that we get as navigation root url is already correctly http://localhost:3000.

The patch was presumably made to avoid getting http://localhost:8080/Plone as frontend domain. But Volto does a POST to http://localhost:3000/++api++/@users/maurits/reset-password, so the backend already sees localhost:3000 as domain, without needing the patch.

When you instead with curl do a POST to http://localhost:8080/Plone/++api++/@users/maurits/reset-password then the frontend domain is localhost:8080/Plone. So only with that url it would be needed.

So I think this patch is no longer needed with current Volto, probably because of the "seamless mode" introduced in Volto 14. Could that be true?

In my case I did an override to basically undo the patch, by registering my own mail_password_template with PasswordResetToolView and the original construct_url method, and the url in the email was fine, showing that the patch is not needed, at least not in my use case.

This trips up more people. I got contacted by someone a few months ago with this problem, but did not know where to start looking. If something was wrong, I would have expected to find problems in many more areas, not just a password reset url.
I am surprised I did not find more reports (maybe my search keywords were wrong), except an issue from 2021 which put me on the right path.

So I would be in favour of removing the patch.
Or we could keep the patch in case it is needed in other cases, but by default set frontend_domain to an empty string (and make it not required). Then the patch would be basically inactive, unless someone explicitly sets a frontend domain.

[davisagli]

I expect the patch is still needed if the backend is called (by volto's proxy, or a frontend webserver) without a virtual hosting path.