Your Endpoint Did Not Return a Location Header

There have been some issues with Quill and other services advising that the WordPress Micropub endpoint did not return a Location header. There seems to be some confusion about this, which is partly because the message is a bit technical. One individual thought that this was related to Simple Location.

This indicates an error on the part of the Micropub plugin. Regrettably, in addition to not displaying the error response prominently, the Micropub specification dictates that the error response returns one of 4 error codes, and may return a human readable error description to assist the client developer in understanding the error, but is not meant to be shown to the end user.

This does not account for errors on the endpoint side that may need to be debugged. Currently, the WordPress plugin that creates the endpoint does not surface error messages on its side either to allow you to figure this out.

Better error messaging to the end-user on one side or the other seems to be a common issue amongst Indieweb tools to help them figure out the issue.

The most common issue that explains the failure is an inability to associate the URL with the user account. There are two versions of the software that does this.

  • In the IndieAuth plugin, to ensure accuracy, the plugin passes the WordPress user ID in the return to ensure that it can find it.
  • If you don’t have the IndieAuth plugin installed, the Micropub plugin uses an external IndieAuth endpoint instead of a built-in one, and the following techniques to find the WordPress user from your URL
    • If you have the Indieweb plugin installed, it looks in its settings for the default author on a single author site.
    • If you are using the URL of your author post archive, usually /author/username it will try to use that to get your username and therefore your user ID
    • If you have set a website URL in your profile, it will try to use that. Please make sure your website URL uses https if your website does, as this has caused some issues in matching.

In both plugins, we continue to improve the functionality in this case and I often port ideas that improved functionality in one version into the other, as they are both authorize Micropub using IndieAuth, but in the case of the Indieauth plugin, it also implements the IndieAuth functionality.

Right now, I’m working on improvements to the Micropub plugin to improve the error handling, among other things, and hopefully this will help.

 

David Shanske

My day job is in training for an airline. I also develop Indieweb WordPress plugins so that others can take control of their online identity.

2 Responses

  1. Thanks for writing this up! I’ve made some minor changes to how Quill displays error messages now, as well as tweaked some copy to make it address users rather than developers. Quill started out as a tool to help debug Micropub implementations, so all the copy was phrased to address the developer of a Micropub endpoint. That was before https://micropub.rocks existed. Quill later evolved to be a much more robust client that can create a bunch of kinds of content, and I hadn’t yet gone back through and updated the text. It’s clear this has become necessary, so hopefully these changes make a difference now!

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