I’ve been working on a small side project lately and having some fun trying some new Ruby on Rails features.

The application allows a user to authenticate using their Twitter account. I’m using the omniauth-twitter gem to implement the Twitter strategy with OmniAuth. It works great; the user is redirected to Twitter to enter their Twitter username and password then sent back to the site with a token for the user’s account.

The Problem

Everything was working great until I implement some of the HTML over the wire goodness of Hotwire.

I have a couple of areas on the site that rely on a Sidekiq and update a page when the job is complete. A perfect use case for Hotwire. The job processed, changes broadcast, and pages updated when the model changed. It worked as planned!

I deployed the update using Hotwire, tested and everything was working as I wanted. Deciding to authenticate a different Twitter account, no longer was I sent to the Twitter page to enter my credentials. No Error on the page; it just did no redirect.

I looked for any errors in the Rails log. I could see the request initiated but it seemed to drop out of sight with nothing additional logged and no errors.

Maybe it’s a browser-specific issue. I usually use Firefox so I tried Chrome and Safari with the same results. Digging a bit deeper I decided to look at the Network tab in the browser to see if the request was giving an error and I found nothing. The request wasn’t going out to Twitter.

Inspecting the console in Firefox revealed this ugly message.

Access to fetch at 'https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authenticate?oauth_token=' (redirected from 'http://127.0.0.1:3000/auth/twitter') from origin 'http://127.0.0.1:3000' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled.

I started to search around for the error, and many solutions had me trying the rack-cors gem and other methods to satisfy what needed to be done. Nothing worked. I spent a couple of hours going down this path to no avail. The error is deceiving and not indicative of the real problem.

Debugging

I had done many updates since the last time I knew this worked, including gem and NPM package updates. After removing and testing each update, the message still appeared.

I determined which code was updated since the feature recently worked. I evaluated and ranked each change by how much I thought it could cause the problem. The only change that was a bit of a black box to me was the addition of Hotwire to the mix. I removed the Hotwire-rails gem and removed all the code related to Hotwire and, moved back to Turbolinks. Magically it all worked again.

Adding Hotwire caused this problem.

A Solution

Being new to Hotwire I wasn’t sure where to start. I started with what any good developer does…a Google search.

I came across some posts on the Hotwire forums and on the Devise Github issues list that provided a solution that worked. One, in particular, gave this solution:

It seems like adding

:data => {turbo: "false"}

and making my link a button seems to make it work as per: Devise github login not working after Turbo enabled. · Issue #45 · hotwired/turbo · GitHub. I now have a different error, but that it something different. So I suppose this is solved for now.

The original button I used to connect with Twitter, looked like this:

button_to "Connect a Twitter account", "/auth/twitter", method: :post, class: "btn btn-primary"

After the suggestion above, it now looks like this:

button_to "Connect a Twitter account", "/auth/twitter", method: :post, data: {turbo: "false"}, class: "btn btn-primary"

After adding the code to the button, it works as it did before. Simply don’t use Turbo for this type of request.

The Turbo docs do discuss disabling Turbo on specific links. The error I received did not do a good job of pointing me in the right direction and I spent some time going down the wrong path. I hope someone else can save some time if they have a similar problem.

Conclusion

Solving this problem was time-consuming, but I learned a bunch. Hotwire is in beta at this time. I’m sure things will improve, and maybe we don’t have to solve problems in this way in the future.

A lesson I learned is the need for some better end-to-end tests for this project. I thought since it was going to Twitter and back, it wasn’t necessary. I was wrong.

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