Phabricator AphrontRequest / Save Error Fix

By  on  

Working on Phabricator extensions has thrust me back into the world of PHP, a language I had only touched via WordPress plugins and blog themes over the past few years.  Despite being away from the language, I was able to jump back in fairly quickly and felt a small "back at home" comfort...until I realized Phabricator was not greatly documented and that I'd need to dive deep into the source code to figure out how to do just about every task.

One error that baffled me for a while was the following:

You are trying to save some data to Phabricator, but the request your browser made included an incorrect token. Reload the page and try again. You may need to clear your cookies.

I was trying to create and save a PhabricatorAuthTemporaryToken instance for the sake of allowing login via a third party service, and the request from that service to Phabricator was made in the background, so there was no PHCID because there was no session, thus the CSRF token was invalid.  Essentially I needed a way to write to Phabricator without a CSRF validation (via PHCID) step.  The solution was simple:

// Turn off CSRF check
$unguarded = AphrontWriteGuard::beginScopedUnguardedWrites();
// Save token
id(new PhabricatorAuthTemporaryToken())
  ->setTokenResource($transaction_code)
  // ...
  ->save();
// Turn CSRF check back on
unset($unguarded);

AphrontWriteGuard::beginScopedUnguardedWrites() allowed me to turn of the CSRF check, save the token, and then turn the CSRF check back on via unset.  Short amount of code but took a long time to find!

I love that advanced libraries like Phabricator insist on these security checks without developers having to do so explicitly; I also love that turning off this check momentarily is easy.  I'll be sure to share more PHP / Phabricator tips as I run into problems!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Use Elements as Background Images with -moz-element

    We all know that each browser vendor takes the liberty of implementing their own CSS and JavaScript features, and I'm thankful for that. Mozilla and WebKit have come out with some interesting proprietary CSS properties, and since we all know that cementing standards...

  • By
    LightFace:  Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!