[Squeaks72]

Summary

Deciding whether a title is worth keeping usually takes one chapter. Before this PR, the only way to read that chapter was to add the series, read it, and remove it again. That leaves a folder, a listing, a chapter floor and a row behind. This PR adds a Read a chapter first button to the add dialog. It opens the title straight from the source and writes nothing.

Server (bff/src/routes/sources.ts): two read-only routes in the sources plugin.

• GET /api/sources/preview/chapters?source=&sourceId= lists the chapters with one copy per number, chosen by the same chooseReleases / effectivePrefsFor rule that /api/sources/detail counts with, so the list matches what an add would land. detail stays count-only on purpose, so the add dialog doesn't pay for rows it never reads.
• GET /api/sources/preview/pages?source=&chapterId= returns the source's own page URLs.
• Neither route persists anything: no series row, no files, no progress. Both sit behind the plugin's canDownload preHandler and apply the same by-id age-cap rule as detail: the cap answers 403, and the 18+ reveal does not apply.

No new byte proxy. The web app renders each page through the existing /img/sources/cover proxy. That proxy already fetches a remote image named by a source with the source's referer and Cloudflare cookies, behind the SSRF guard (fetchableCoverUrl and the engine-origin exemption) and the root /img/ authorization hook. A second proxy for pages would have to re-solve all of that, and the note on authorizeImageRequest in routes/images.ts records a downstream proxy that shipped without auth. One consequence: preview pages go into the same LRU image cache as covers (srccover2:1600:<url>).

Things I found and fixed while porting this:

• Page width. The client asked for w=1400, but the proxy only allows 400, 800 and 1600 and treats anything else as 400. Every page rendered at cover-tile size. It now asks for w=1600 (withoutEnlargement keeps a narrower original as it is).
• Extension sources can't be previewed through this proxy. Their page URLs are paths on the extension engine's private origin, and the proxy's only engine exemption is the thumbnail shape (engineCoverUrl). Widening that exemption to pages would give any signed-in reader an authenticated GET on the engine. So /preview/pages answers 422 preview_unsupported for a sw: source before it asks the engine anything, and the dialog doesn't offer the button for one. Built-in and add-a-site sources, whose pages are public URLs, work.
• Doc comments. The route block had an orphaned doc comment (about a sourceBrowsableFor helper that doesn't exist upstream) stacked above the chapters route. detail's own one-line comment had also been separated from its route. Each comment now sits on its own route.

Web (web/components/PreviewReader.tsx, AddSeriesDialog.tsx): this is not the real reader, on purpose. That reader is built on a book id and carries progress, bookmarks, offline copies and the next-chapter chain, and none of those exist for something outside the library. The preview is a chapter list, then a lazy-loaded vertical scroll with Previous and Next buttons, and Add to library at the bottom of the list.

Desktop: the preview is available there too. Upstream keeps every /api/sources/* route on desktop (Discover and adding work the same as on a server; DESKTOP_HIDDEN_ROUTES covers only sign-in, members, sessions, tokens and push), and this is the same kind of feature. desktopRoutes.test.ts passes: its server table is openapi.yaml, which now describes both routes.

Type

• Fix
• Feature
• Docs
• Refactor / chore

Testing

Re-run after rebasing onto v0.45.0 (91b41aa): bff 1859 tests, 1846 pass, 9 fail, 4 skipped — the same 9 embedded-Postgres entrypoint failures main has in this environment (main: 1857 / 1844 / 9 / 4), nothing new; web 431/431; both typechecks OK. The detail below is from the first run, on v0.44.0.

I ran the upstream CI setup in node:24-alpine against a real postgres:16-alpine (TEST_DATABASE_URL set, so the SQL tests run instead of skipping), first on plain upstream/main (a8bc502) to get a baseline and then on this branch.

	upstream/main (baseline)	this branch
bff tsc --noEmit	OK	OK
bff tests	1834 tests, 1821 pass, 9 fail, 4 skipped	1836 tests, 1823 pass, same 9 fail, 4 skipped (2 new)
web tsc --noEmit	OK	OK
web tests	421/421	421/421

The 9 bff failures are the same on both: they are the embedded-Postgres entrypoint tests (not ok 291-299), which need an initdb/socket setup this sandbox doesn't have. No new failures.

Added to bff/test/sourceAccess.int.test.ts:

• both preview routes are in its ROUTES table, so canDownload:false has to be refused on them like every other route in the plugin
• both are in the "every by-id route refuses the adult source for a capped account" list
• the preview reads a chapter and writes nothing: one copy per number, page URLs returned, and no lib_series row
• the preview refuses an extension source before asking the engine: 422 preview_unsupported, and the adapter's getPageUrls is never called

Both routes are in bff/openapi.yaml and in the route list in docs/api.md, so openapiCoverage and desktopRoutes both pass.

The six new strings are translated in all eight locale files. The Add to library button reuses the existing key. npm run test:i18n is a Puppeteer walk against a running server, so it could not run in this sandbox. I checked separately that every tr() key this PR adds is present in all eight files.

Checklist

• Focused scope (one topic)
• Matches the existing TypeScript style
• Docs updated if user-facing (docs/USAGE.md)
• No new default sources hardcoded to specific sites (the engine system reaches sites by URL)

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[AngeloSha]

Thanks for this, previewing a chapter before you add a series is a great idea. I can't merge it as it is, though.

The new pages route passes the caller's chapterId straight to the source engine, and for the add-a-site engines that turns into a request from FlareSolverr's browser, inside the Docker network. Any signed-in account could point it at the extension engine, the database or something on the LAN, and error messages came back word for word, which would also show what's listening where. While checking that I found a quieter version of the same problem in the cover proxy, which is fixed in v0.45.1.

There were some smaller things as well: the age cap never applied to add-a-site sources, /chapters didn't check for disabled sources, there was no cooldown or timeout budget, every preview page got cached for a year, and the viewer ended up squeezed inside the dialog because of backdrop-filter.

I rebuilt it so a page can only be fetched for a chapter that's actually in that series' listing: the client names a chapter by its number and a page by its index, so no address from the browser reaches a source at all. The server fetches each page itself, through the same guard covers go through. One upside of doing it that way: extension sources work too, which yours had to leave out.

Your UI was the starting point. It shipped in v0.47.0 as Read a chapter first in the add dialog, with credit to you.