I recently switched to the Google+ Sign in OAuth2 hybrid approach.
When the request code is exchanged for the access token, the expiry time and created time is sent back along with the access token in seconds.
I need to know the sent timezone is. I need this to make comparison with my server's time and be able to deduce if access token has actually expired.
What's the timezone or how do I determine it?
The token bundle sent back does not include an actual expiration time, but it does contain the number of seconds for the expected life of the token. If a time is being attached to it, it is being attached by the local library.
That said - you can't necessarily trust this number. There are a number of reasons why the token may have been revoked or is treated as no longer valid. So while you can use it as an estimate of when you'll need to get a new one - you should also handle the case where you use a token and you get an authentication error, forcing you to refresh the token and try again.
My bad.
I just went through the Google PHP APi client library. Only to realize the created field was set within the library (on my server) in Google_Auth_OAuth2's authenticate method.
So it is safe to use $client->isAccessTokenExpired() instead to try to do one's computation. Works with local time (I guess :))
Thank you.
Related
Im wondering if anyone has any answers to this. If one follows the quickstart here:
https://developers.google.com/calendar/api/quickstart/go
we can get authorization from a user that allows us to do things with their calendar.
It seems the HTTP Client given back from the config handles calling the refresh token and keeping the client up to date.
First, as a side-question, does anyone know how long this is allowed to persist? I read in a doc somewhere that for unpublished apps/projects its 7 days, but it didn't specify a timeline otherwise. Is it indefinite or will this expire at some point (ie the refresh token runs out after 30 days). And is this avoidable at all?
now, the real question - if you take the service down entirely, ie for an update, and restart it, is there any way to opick up the authorization again? In the tutorial its writing a code to disk and reading as needed. In my case I just hold reference to the things I need in the application, so obviously when the service went down id have to reauthorize. I then tried writing the code to disk on a persistent volume and re-reading from that, but it doesnt get authorized - I guess because the new instance of the service has a new instance of the oauth config, and it wont accept the old code perhaps?
In any case, im wondering if anyone knows of a way to make this persist through ssytem restarts, or if the only real option here is to move the calendar service client to a small microservice on the side that we do not restart, and contact it from elsewhere as needed.
Thanks in advance!
The refresh token expiration is documented here. As you've noted, tokens expire in 7 days for projects in "Testing" status. Refresh tokens for projects in production last indefinitely, but there are some scenarios where they may get invalidated (user revokes access, token has not been used in 6 months, the account has over 50 live tokens, etc.). It's not mentioned but if you change your OAuth scopes you'll probably need to reauthorize as well.
This means that as long as you keep your refresh tokens and none of the invalidation conditions are met, you should be able to keep using them to get new access tokens even if your service goes down temporarily. But as mentioned in the documentation, you should anticipate the possibility that the token stops working and redirect the user to authorize again.
My guess is that in your case the refresh token stopped working for some reason (maybe the 7 days limit) and the application just tried to use the same expired token. The Quickstarts in Google's documentation usually handle the creation of the token file and how to reuse it, but they don't include the part where you have an invalid token and need to reauthorize.
References:
Google's OAuth2 Overview
OAuth2 for Web Apps
I've been working to setup Oauth communication for an auto-emailing node.js web app using nodemailer. (I don't wish to use gmail's Less Secure Apps setting).
I've taken steps to get the client id, secret, and refresh token from the oauth playground, and have set up the web app to use a stored refresh token to request new access tokens when it first loads.
It is able to send emails (for about 7 days), then I get error invalid status code 400 on client side, and/or invalid grant on server side.
Going back to google playground and getting another refresh token, then updating it in environment variables, solves this for another week. But I'd like to solve this indefinitely.
I read somewhere "A Google Cloud Platform project with an OAuth consent screen configured for an external user type and a publishing status of 'Testing' is issued a refresh token expiring in 7 days"... so last week I switched the app to "In Production" (at console.cloud.google.com) and tried having it verified with google. This week, the same issue has recurred suggesting that wasn't the right fix, or that it wasn't yet verified with google.
I don't know if this was done correctly, nor do I know if this is the true solution to this expiring/revoked refresh token, or invalid grant.
I've also come across these explanations:
The user has revoked your app's access.
The refresh token has not been used for six months.
The user changed passwords and the refresh token contains Gmail scopes.
The user account has exceeded a maximum number of granted (live) refresh tokens.
The client has reached a limit of 50 refresh tokens per account if it's not a service account.
(I didn't make ANY changes during the week, so...not sure why these would have changed)
Is the issue the refresh token?
Or the status of the application?
Would it be dns/cname/cloudflare server issues?
For those who have the same issue in the future:
It turned out that google verification wasn't necessary.
It seems like the refresh token expiring after a week or 7 days was due to the placement of the oauth2Client.setCredentials() function call and accessToken variable.
Calling setCredentials() and obtaining the access token INSIDE the SendEmail() function (at runtime, just before sending email, rather than at application start/spinup time) seemed like it enabled the code to more dynamically generate the tokens it needed. After 12 days, it still seems like its working so I'd call this a success.
My guess at why it wasn't working before was because setting credentials outside of a function meant that code only ran once on server/application startup. It would then store the obtained access token in a const.
The access token would eventually expire, and even if called again/later inside of a function to obtain a new access token, it would be unable to change the value of a const property/variable, and so the call would inevitably fail after a week when it failed to renew.
Hope this helps anyone else having a similar issue.
My apologies for the run-on sentences.
There are a lot of causes for invalid grant it sounds to me like your refresh token is expiring.
If your project on google developer console is still in testing, has not been moved to published and has not gone though the google application verification process then refresh tokens have a max two week life span after which they will expire which may explain your invalid grant. The thing is there is no official word from google that this is happening its just what a lot of developers are seeing these days.
Another one is with gmail scopes if the user changes their password this will also cause the refresh token to expire.
I've integrated with Gmail OAuth and have it working pretty good. The only remaining issue is using the refreshToken to retrieve a new accessToken when it expires. I persist both of these in CoreData so I have easy access to them anywhere in my app. My problem is that I don't know where to do the refresh. Does Mailcore provide an NSNotification or similar when a request fails? This way I know that the token needs refreshed and I can refresh it and retry the request with the new token.
Update:
My current solution is simply to refresh the token every time the app becomes active. I would prefer to only refresh the token when it expires (i.e. when a request fails).
Instead of randomly guessing when a good time to update the token would be, use the 'expires_in' value to run some kind of logic about whether or not enough time has passed to warrant a refresh of the token.Or What I do is grab the token the first time and set a timestamp. Then, on the next call to do anything IMAP/SMTP related I check if the current timestamp is >= 50 minutes since the last update (tokens are only good for an hour so this seems to work well).
Hope this helps! :)
My Box app (using v2 API) keeps track of when an access token expires, and when the app realizes the access token is about to expire, it request a new access token using the refresh token (the reason is that it simpler to avoid errors than to handle them).
I noticed that lately (this definitely was working properly a few months ago), when my app starts up (after more than 1 hour of non-use), the request for a new access token fails! The interesting thing is that at this time, my app has not attempted to use the now expired access token.
Should my app first do a dummy action with the expired access token maybe as a workaround? Again, all this was working as expected when I converted the app over to V2 API. At that time, the refresh token was valid for 14 days.
Thanks
Peter
I've tried to reproduce it, and I'm not able to. My refresh tokens are all working. It could be that you are getting an error condition on your refresh that you are not catching. There are some cases where your admin can decide that the app you are using is no longer approved for your enterprise, and on refresh, you'll be booted out. Or you may have mis-typed your password enough times that your password is going into "captcha" mode, looking to verify that there's a human, and not a machine on the other end of the wire.
Let me suggest that you log out of the app, and log back in. You're more likely to get presented with the error, since Box will be giving you the auth screen, and Box handles all the weird cases in their OAuth2 screens.
Yet another reason, that for all the pain of implementing Oauth2, it's worth it to get a better experience for your users.
I'm calling into a 3rd party API from my ASP.NET MVC app. This API uses a service/API token that you get by calling a "renew" API. It expires after 5 days.
If you call one of the service's APIs and the token as expired, you get an "api token expired" error and you can call the renew function.
I don't want to do this because it complicates my code by having to always check for the "api token expired" error and have the logic to retry. I'd rather just make sure the renew function gets called "relatively frequently but not on every request".
I do not want to use a timer or chron solution if I can avoid it.
I thought I read somewhere that IIS7+ automatically by default recycles the application instances on a regular basis. If this default is less than 5 days then I can just use Application_Start.
You can just use Application_Start and check that it has been at least x time since the last time you renewed the token, perhaps by storing a DateTime of when the last token was retrieved in a database or file.
You shouldn't have the app automatically starting up just for this.
(my advice would be to use the API in the way it is supposed to be used; you might run into a problem with the API provider if you request it too often, for example.)