This introduces an unhandled server exception. An error occurs inside of authenticate but it is ignored. authenticate is not AdminJS-provided function though but something you implement. You might as well put try..catch inside of your authenticate function.

By defaulting adminUser to null the UI will say that person's email/password are wrong when a server error occurs which is a bad UX. To prevent your server from crashing you can implement a global error handling middleware which will catch any unhandled exceptions from your endpoints.

https://github.com/goldbergyoni/nodebestpractices