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Frequently Asked Questions

Below are a number of questions or issues that have arisen from using the SDK.

Why is the user logged out when they refresh the page in their SPA?

After logging in, if the page is refreshed and the user appears logged out, it usually means that the silent authentication step has failed to work.

This could be affected by a couple of things:

Please try these to see if you can get unblocked:

  • Try it in a browser like Chrome which does not block third-party cookies by default (yet)
  • Use the New Login Experience, if possible
  • Supply the social connection with your own client ID and secret in the Auth0 dashboard

Why does the Auth0Client object take a long time to initialize?

Sometimes the createAuth0Client asynchronous method can take over 30 seconds to complete. createAuth0Client may also return undefined and produce an error when you try to access it.

This is usually down to a configuration problem between your application, and the Auth0 application you're trying to log in with. Things to check:

  • Make sure that options passed to createAuth0Client include the correct client ID and domain values for the app you're using
  • Ensure that the Allowed Callback URLs, Allowed Web Origins, and Allowed Logout URLs are correctly set up in your Auth0 app settings for your application

To verify that you're hitting this problem, check the logs in your Auth0 dashboard for any failed login events, which may provide a clue as to the problem.

Why do I get an "invalid algorithm" error?

The SDK only supports JWTs that use the RS256 signing algorithm. If you're getting this error, it's likely that the Auth0 application you're authenticating with is set up to sign tokens using HS256.

The way around this error is to change the settings for your Auth0 application to sign tokens using RS256. To do this:

  • Log in to your dashboard
  • Open the settings page for the application you're using
  • Scroll to the bottom and click Show advanced settings
  • Click the OAuth tab
  • Ensure the JsonWebToken Signature Algorithm value is set to RS256
  • Click Save

The next time you try to authenticate, you should not receive this error.

Why do I get Error: Invalid state in Firefox when refreshing the page immediately after a login?

This is caused by a bug in Firefox.

When logging in with a redirect, you will be redirected back to your app with code and state values set as URL query parameters. These values are used by handleRedirectCallback to obtain an access token, and should be removed from the URL and browser history when the code has been successfully exchanged for a token (to reduce attack surface). This can be done with history.replaceState.

For example, in the Auth0 React Samples, a function onRedirectCallback is called for this purpose. This function calls history.replaceState. But due to the mentioned bug, Firefox will reload the last URL from cache when refreshing the page (i.e. the "last" URL before calling history.replaceState).

This means that after logging in and being redirected to your app with state and code parameters in the URL, even though history.replaceState removed them from the URL and browser history, the bug just loads the full redirect URL from cache when you refresh the page. For example http://localhost:3000?code=123&state=xyz.

In the sample app this triggers the handleRedirectCallback code again, but with "stale" code and state values. And this result in Error: Invalid state, because the code already has been exchanged for a token, making the state invalid at this point in time.

We can fix this with a temporary workaround (suggested in the Firefox bug report) by adding location.hash = location.hash; before calling history.replaceState:

const onRedirectCallback = appState => {
  // Temporary Firefox workaround
  window.location.hash = window.location.hash; // eslint-disable-line no-self-assign

  window.history.replaceState(
    {},
    document.title,
    appState && appState.targetUrl
      ? appState.targetUrl
      : window.location.pathname
  );
};

With this change, an immediate refresh after login works as expected.

Note that even though the workaround doesn't cause any weird side effects in browers, you should ideally remove it after the bug has been fixed in Firefox.

For more context see this issue.

Why do I get auth0_spa_js_1.default is not a function when using Typescript?

If you're hitting this issue, set esModuleInterop: true in your tsconfig.json file (inside compilerOptions).

Due to how the type system works in Typescript, if one of your dependencies uses allowSyntheticDefaultImports: true, then all the consumers of that dependency must use allowSyntheticDefaultImports: true as well. This, of course, is not ideal and might break your app if you depend on this setting being false. The Typescript team added the esModuleInterop flag that helps in this scenario.

Why do I get auth0-spa-js must run on a secure origin?

Internally, the SDK uses Web Cryptography API to create SHA-256 digest.

According to the spec (via Github issues), Web Cryptography API requires a secure origin, so that accessing Crypto.subtle in a not secure context return undefined.

In most browsers, secure origins are origins that match at least one of the following (scheme, host, port) patterns:

(https, *, *)
(wss, *, *)
(*, localhost, *)
(*, 127/8, *)
(*, ::1/128, *)
(file, *, —)

If you're running your application from a secure origin, it's possible that your browser doesn't support the Web Crypto API. For a compatibility table, please check https://caniuse.com/#feat=mdn-api_subtlecrypto