Backend (NC) not responding, Debug mode/log not working/empty

Hi @bazed,

With this little information it could be hard to understand what’s going on with your bridge, but lets give it a try.

I assume you are trying to build a bridge using the template wizard and you are stuck in the backend step, isn’t it? At this step Forms Bridge tries to ping the backend to validate the credentials and without a successful response you can’t go further.

The wizard process lacks a more in depth logs coverage to make it more debugable. We are working on it. At the same time, if you aren’t seeing nothing on the debug console is because there are no errors, good news.

Let me explain a little more in detail how the bridge connection is done: Nextcloud exposes its Webdav API (the protocol that uses Forms Bridge to talk with it) under the endpoint /remote.php/dav/files/${username}. This URL path is appended to the base URL of your backend by Forms Bridge. For example, if your have your backend registered with the base URL https://nextcloud.example.coop, the endpoint where the ping will be done will be https://nextcloud.example.coop/remote.php/dav/files/${username}.

Nextcloud supports to be exposed under a sub-path of a domain, like https://example.coop/nextcloud. If that is the case, the resulting endpoint will be https://example.coop/nextcloud/remote.php/dav/files/${username}. If you are in this second scenario, double check that the backend URL has the sub-path included in such a way that the resulting URL matches one of the examples. Take in mind that the /remote.php/dav/files/${username} is appended dynamically by PHP and the backend base URL should have only the root URL of your Nextcloud.

Lets talk about the ${username} part of this URLs. This is a variable part that is replaced by the username from the backend credential. The webdav protocol works with the Basic HTTP authentication schema. This means that, to grant access to your private files, the webdav requests should includes an authorization header with your user login and your password. In Forms Bridge you can attach this kind of credentials to the backend. If you are working with the template wizard you’ve probably done it in the previous step. If you are trying to do it manually, start by registering a Basic credential with your login and password and then bind it to the backend. To work properly, the user login should be your username, not your email, and that’s because the username of the credential is the value that Forms Bridge will be use to replace the ${username} part of the endpoint and if you try to authenticate with your user email the resulting URL will be invalid.

That’s all we can tell to you, I hope it helps. Excuse me for going on so long wit the explanation. If you have more details about your problem maybe we can be able to give you more precise answers.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Hi @bazed,

I can’t see the attached image, sorry, but we can understand something from your explanation.

Let’s see if this help: The CLIENT ID field of the credential should be the username with which you want to authenticate against Nextcloud, the CLIENT SECRET its password. Based on your last message, you are using Bridge as the client_id/username. Does this username exists on your Nextcloud? The Sabre\Dav\Exception\NotFound exception could be explained if no user with this username were found. Maybe you are introducing the username in the NAME field of the credential? This field is an internal label to identify the credential, but it is not used in the authorization request.

Hi @bazed,

Thanks for the images, but after all, I can’t realize what the problem is with your backend connection, sorry.

In order to help to debug your problem we’ve released a new version of Forms Bridge with more log coverage, including error logs on the backend ping process. If you upgrade the plugin to version 4.1.2, you may be able to get more context about what’s going on under the hood. We would appreciate it if you could share with us these logs with us. With this information, we may be able to improve the Nextcloud addon and fix the bug, if that is the case.

Kind regards!

That’s interesting! This error indicates that you are trying to establish a SSL encrypted connection over HTTP (https://) to a host that does not have a valid SSL certificate, or maybe a self signed certificate, it could be?

You have two approaches to solve this issue. If the host does not have a certificate, update your backend base URL to work with the http:// schema instead the https://. If the host has a self signed certificate, you have to skip SSL verification. To do that you can copy this code in your WordPress theme functions.php file, or maybe with a plugin like WPCode:

add_filter( 'http_request_args', 'bazed_skip_nc_ssl_verification', 10, 2 );

function bazed_skip_nc_ssl_verification( $args, $url ) {
    if ( false !== strpos( $url, 'https://xxxBASEURLxxx' ) ) {
        // Skip SSL verification for NC HTTP requests.
        $args['sslverify'] = false;
    }

    return $args;
}

Pleas, if you have to copy this code on your theme, do it with care, I don’t want to break nothing on your WordPress site!

I’m glad it’s been resolved!

Thanks you too, at the end of this thread we have an improved version of the plugin than when we started.

We hope you enjoy the plugin.

• This reply was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Còdec.