Lauri Koskela

Blog posts

Why is Bitwarden returning 503s to my Windows app?

September 02, 2023 - 3589 words - 18 mins

For a few years now, I've been developing a TUI Bitwarden client app called Wden. While Bitwarden does not have a stable API for writing alternative clients, the APIs for the official clients have been pretty well documented by third parties. It's not too difficult to write a client against those, but it will occasionally break when Bitwarden makes changes to their servers.

Recently, I ran against a peculiar issue where Bitwarden started to consistently return errors to Wden, but only when running on Windows. There seemed to be no good explanation for this - the functionality is completely identical between platforms. I found the whole thing quite intriguing and I decided to write something about how I debugged the issue and worked around it.

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