🐛 Bug Report: "Unauthorized"; fixed by restarting instance.

[Tokarak]

Describe the bug

At some point, the instance seems to start receiving only "unauthorized" responses from Reddit (several hours). Restarting Redlib fixes the behaviour temporarily.

Steps to reproduce the bug

That's all I know so far.

Additional context / screenshot

I'm running Redlib on my laptop, and accessing the instance on localhost. It's a portable laptop, so I switch IPs often. The old Libreddit worked perfectly (even after the api changes), since I never hit rate limits.

Does Redlib have a logging feature, to help with debugging?

[sigaloid]

Is this after long periods of time? If so, it could be related to the OAuth token refreshing

Run with RUST_LOG=info to run with additional logging (works with release).

Starting Redlib...
 INFO  redlib > Evaluating config.
 INFO  redlib > Evaluating instance info.
 INFO  redlib > Creating OAUTH client.
 INFO  redlib::oauth > [🔄] Spoofing Android client with headers: {"Client-Vendor-Id": "xxx", "User-Agent": "Reddit/Version 2023.43.0/Build 1257426/Android 11", "X-Reddit-Device-Id": "xxx"}, uuid: "xxx", and OAuth ID "ohXpoqrZYub1kg"
 INFO  redlib::oauth > [✅] Success - Retrieved token "eyXXX...", expires in 86399
 INFO  redlib::oauth > [⏳] Waiting for 86279s seconds before refreshing OAuth token...
Running Redlib v0.31.0 on 0.0.0.0:8080!

After 24 hours, which is when the token expires, it should automatically refresh the token and print "Refreshing OAuth token..." followed by "success" or "failed".

[Tokarak]

That seems like a reasonable hypothesis. Could something be preventing the token refresh if the laptop is closed (sleeping) when the token expires?

[sigaloid]

Yes, that will inhibit the token daemon from refreshing - time spent suspended doesn't count towards the timer, so if you suspend for 12 hours, then wake it up, it will think there's still 24 hours left. tokio-rs/tokio#5894 (comment)

Maybe it would make sense to catch an auth error in client.rs and then refresh the oauth client, in case there was any other problems. But for now, you can also cycle through auth tokens by simply restarting the program.

[Tokarak]

https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib/blob/0f148c58d3bb78b01d44edc7df5e7180c6363a12/src/oauth.rs#L111C1-L131C2

Seems like this loop could easily break for a number of reasons when the laptop is closed. Either a) a refresh is skipped because a laptop is closed or b) the wait timer pauses when the laptop is closed, meaning the OAuth token isn't refreshed when it's needed.

[Tokarak]

What I'll do is work out the exact error code and message Reddit sends when the OAuth token expires (this will take slightly more than 24 hours :)) (Or maybe the Reddit official or unofficial api docs can help); in the error handling atomically refresh the token, then retry the request. That way some conditions are met:

• The end user does not notice the error (apart from a few milliseconds longer delay on first connect).
• The token isn't refreshed on other reasons for "unauthorised" (potentially: private subreddits; deleted posts)
• A "dead" instance (0 users) doesn't send any extra requests to Reddit.

[Opening-Button-8988]

Had the same issue, I left it on overnight and figured it was probably due to the API token refreshing.

[ButteredCats]

Just ran into this issue too, except my instance is running on a server that's on 24/7.

It's been running without issue for over a week until today.

[sigaloid]

Hm, okay so we need to catch this in client.rs. Do you remember the exact error you got?

[ButteredCats]

Checking in the logs for that day the only things out of the ordinary I see are
ERROR redlib::utils > Error page rendered: Unauthorized and
ERROR redlib::utils > Error page rendered: Reddit is having issues, check if there's an outage

Since then I've been running with RUST_LOG=info enabled in case it happens again but so far all has been good.

[sigaloid]

Ok, perfect - I'm glad I just added that error page logging in 3609564 😅 Will work on a possible fix for this

[sigaloid]

6c2579c to possibly fix this. If anyone is experiencing this consistently, please test the latest docker container (just pushed).