Follow-up to #233, which made the upload ceiling configurable — the right call,
500MB is genuinely too low for video.
An environment variable is a string, so the value reached multer's
limits.fileSize as text where a number is expected. That survives some
comparisons through coercion and misbehaves in others, which is the worst kind
of bug to find later; the line directly above it already used parseInt for the
same reason. It is parsed properly now, and a suffix is accepted — someone
raising a limit for video is choosing "about 2GB", and 2147483648 is easy to
mistype by a factor of ten.
An unparseable value falls back to the default rather than becoming NaN or
zero. Either would reject every upload on the instance, from a typo in an env
file, with nothing on screen to explain it.
The documentation matters as much as the code here. MAX_FILE_SIZE is the LAST
limit in the chain: nginx caps the request body with client_max_body_size and
returns 413 before the app is reached — our own deployment sets 500M — and
Cloudflare caps uploads per plan at the edge. Raising the variable alone often
changes nothing, so the README now says so, with the nginx directive and a note
that an upload failing with nothing in the server log never reached the server.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
