Failing to authenticate on new wsl setup

[aaronpowell]

I'm in the process of setting up a new machine but in doing so I'm failing to authenticate with gh auth login.

Here's the terminal output:

❯ gh auth login
? What account do you want to log into? GitHub.com
? What is your preferred protocol for Git operations? HTTPS
? Authenticate Git with your GitHub credentials? Yes
? How would you like to authenticate GitHub CLI? Login with a web browser

! First copy your one-time code: <snip>
- Press Enter to open github.com in your browser...
failed to authenticate via web browser: Too many requests have been made in the same timeframe. (slow_down)

In the browser though the auth process goes through correctly, I entered the code, I approved access to my account/orgs, and I was presented with the success screen, only to find my terminal having the error.

I appear to be on the latest release:

❯ gh version
gh version 2.21.2 (2023-01-03)
https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/tag/v2.21.2

And the WSL version is:

❯ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Release:        22.04
Codename:       jammy

[mislav]

Hi, thanks for reporting and sorry for the trouble. I have never seen this error before. The server error indicates that the authorization flow was polling the API too frequently, but that should never be the case because we get the polling interval (usually 5 seconds) from the server in the first place.

Does this happen every time? You can do GH_DEBUG=api gh auth login -h github.com -p https -w to see underlying HTTP requests. Before completing the browser part of the authorization flow, you can look at the terminal log to see how frequently do polling API requests get made. More information about this would definitely be useful. Thanks!

[aaronpowell]

Tried with the debugging and it worked this time, which is totally not going to help with any sort of diagnostics 😅

[mislav]

Ouch haha, well thanks for trying 😅 Might have been a hiccup with rate limiting on the server, too. You can try re-authenticating a few times with gh auth refresh -h github.com and if it ever fails with the same error, please let us know!

[hrai]

This solution doesn't work

[JollyRen]

same, and using the above GH_DEBUG=api gh auth login -h github.com -p https -w I get unknown shorthand flag: 'p' in -p

[JollyRen]

I made a token instead and used that, but I'd rather not

[TzviPM]

fwiw, I just had the same issue and running with GH_DEBUG=api fixed it. Seems weird that a debug flag would affect the runtime behaviour.

[YuyueminAustin]

thanks this works on my laptop as well lol, I believe it's a bug

[hrai]

I tried setting that env var but it still fails.

[YuyueminAustin]

similar situation, I'm now trying ubuntu 22.04 instead of 20.04 to see if it works

[leonfeng]

I just encountered this issue with gh 2.37.0 on freshly installed Ubuntu 22.04.

My first attempt at gh auth login failed because I forgot to install wslu and gh couldn't open a browser tab. All subsequent requests failed with this error:

error=authorization_pending&error_description=The+authorization+request+is+still+pending.&error_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.github.com%2Fdevelopers%2Fapps%2Fauthorizing-oauth-apps%23error-codes-for-the-device-flow

It appears the API is still waiting for me to paste in the first one-time code (which I no longer have). A way to cancel pending authorization request(s) would be nice.

[peccu]

Please check your clock in WSL environment.
Maybe it should be wrong.
Before run the command gh auth login, you need to fix the clock like this command sudo date +%T "10:10:00"

[schlich]

Setting the time zone worked for me on nixOS