'redirected you too many times' when accessing r studio from control panel

[RobinL]

Occasionally users report issues like this:

I'm having trouble opening rstudio from home. I can open the cpanel but when i try to open rstudio it says <username>-rstudio.tools.alpha.mojanalytics.xyz redirected you too many times

I have also experienced this problem in the past - I've never managed to figure out a reliable way of reproducing it.

Workaround

Usually if I close the web browser and re-open, it works again.

[davidread]

it’s an intermittent issue that has no one resolution or obvious pattern.

this is the issue @xoen sees on safari sometimes

More workarounds:

switch from firefox to chrome or vice versa

after a while it usually mysteriously starts working on Chrome again

[davidread]

I captured it in firefox with dev tools open:

The URL sequence is:

/
/login
https://dev-analytics-moj.eu.auth0.com/authorize?prompt=none&response_type=code&client_id=<redacted>&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fdavidread-jupyter-lab.tools.dev.mojanalytics.xyz%2Fcallback&scope=openid%20openid%20email%20profile%20offline_access
/callback?error=login_required&error_description=Multifactor%20authentication%20required
/login
...

Auth0 should show the page where it offers GitHub login, then the MFA screen, then callback with a code. Instead it calls the app back with an error about MFA.

I found this error mentioned in the Silent Auth docs: "login_required: The user was not logged in at Auth0, so silent authentication is not possible". I'm not clear what is the problem.

However the docs then say that when getting this error, control panel should redirect to Auth0 but without the prompt=none parameter. I tried this manually and logged in ok, so we should do this.

[davidread]

This may well be the same problem as #52 !!

[calumabarnett]

This error also seems to occur when a user tries to log in when they are not a member of the GitHub organisation.