fix: Enhance admin API health check reliability and error handling

[Ragini-Microsoft]

Purpose

This pull request improves the reliability and clarity of backend API health checks and the API proxying logic. It enhances the health check to better distinguish between valid backend responses and frontend fallback, and improves the server's error handling when the backend is misconfigured or unavailable.

Backend health check improvements:

• The check_admin_api_health function now retries more times (8 instead of 5) with a longer delay (20s instead of 10s), and its docstring clarifies it also handles container restarts.
• The health check now verifies that a 200 OK response from the admin API actually contains the expected JSON structure ({"status": "healthy"}), and logs warnings if the response is unexpected or if HTML is returned (which often means the frontend is serving a fallback instead of the backend). This helps catch misconfigurations where the backend is not properly connected.

API proxy and error handling improvements:

• In server.js, the API proxy middleware setup is refactored for clarity, and a new handler is added: if BACKEND_URL is not set, API requests to /api now get a clear 503 error response instead of falling through to the frontend SPA, which would incorrectly return a 200 with index.html. [1] [2]

Does this introduce a breaking change?

• Yes
• No

Golden Path Validation

• I have tested the primary workflows (the "golden path") to ensure they function correctly without errors.

Deployment Validation

• I have validated the deployment process successfully and all services are running as expected with this change.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Note

Copilot was unable to run its full agentic suite in this review.

Improves admin API health checks and /api proxy behavior to avoid false “healthy” signals and to return clearer errors when the backend is unreachable or not configured.

Changes:

• Refactors /api proxy setup and returns a JSON 503 when BACKEND_URL is missing.
• Strengthens admin API health check validation by verifying expected JSON payload vs. frontend HTML fallback.
• Increases health check retry count and delay to better tolerate cold starts/container restarts.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 4 comments.

File	Description
src/App/server/server.js	Improves /api proxy wiring and adds explicit 503 JSON response when backend is not configured.
scripts/post_deploy.py	Enhances health check robustness by validating response contents and increasing retry/backoff timing.

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

[github-actions]

🎉 This PR is included in version 2.5.0 🎉

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