What causes "Pin creation did not return a pin id" in jackwener/OpenCLI?

Re-run with a fresh authenticated session — re-login / refresh cookies, since an expired session often yields empty responses

jackwener/OpenCLI · error · CommandExecutionError

Pin creation did not return a pin id

Error message

Pin creation did not return a pin id

What it means

This CommandExecutionError is thrown in clis/pinterest/pin-create.js:62 after pinterestResourceCreate posts to PinResource/create: if the resource response is falsy or has no `id`, the library cannot know a pin was created, so it fails rather than return a pinId. It is a sanity check that the create call actually yielded a pin object.

Source

Thrown at clis/pinterest/pin-create.js:62

    const link = String(kwargs.link ?? '').trim();

    await page.goto(`${PINTEREST_BASE}${path}`);

    // Resolve the numeric board id the create call needs.
    const { boardId } = await resolveBoardId(page, username, slug, path, preloadedBoard);

    // Validate --section before creating, so a bad value fails before a pin exists.
    const sectionId = section ? (await resolveSection(page, boardId, section, path)).sectionId : '';

    const options = { board_id: boardId, image_url: imageUrl, method: 'scraped' };
    if (title) options.title = title;
    if (description) options.description = description;
    if (link) options.link = link;

    const created = await pinterestResourceCreate(page, 'PinResource', options, path);
    const newId = created && created.id;
    if (!newId) {
      throw new CommandExecutionError('Pin creation did not return a pin id');
    }

    if (sectionId) {
      await movePinToSection(page, newId, boardId, sectionId, path);
    }

    return [{
      pinId: String(newId),
      board: (created.board && created.board.name) || `${username}/${slug}`,
      title: (created.title || created.grid_title || title || '').trim(),
      url: `${PINTEREST_BASE}/pin/${newId}/`,
    }];
  },
});

View on GitHub (pinned to 49907e53dc)

Solutions

Re-run with a fresh authenticated session — re-login / refresh cookies, since an expired session often yields empty responses
Try a different, plainly-hosted image URL on a reputable domain; Pinterest silently rejects spammy or unscrapable images
Confirm the board exists and is writable (can you add a pin to it in the browser?)
Retry later if rate-limited; if it persists, inspect the network response of PinResource/create in a browser to see Pinterest's error field and update the library's response parsing

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Validate before calling

const probe = await fetch(imageUrl, { method: 'HEAD' });
if (!probe.ok) throw new Error('Image URL is not publicly reachable');

Type guard

function hasPinId(res) {
  return res !== null && typeof res === 'object' && res.id !== undefined && res.id !== null;
}

Try / catch

try {
  await run(['pin-create', imageUrl, '--board', board]);
} catch (e) {
  if (/did not return a pin id/.test(e.message)) {
    // refresh session cookies, then retry once
    await refreshSession();
    return retry(() => run(['pin-create', imageUrl, '--board', board]), 1);
  }
  throw e;
}

Prevention

Keep session cookies fresh; re-login when resource calls start returning empty
Use reputable, directly fetchable image URLs (Pinterest silently rejects spammy images)
Confirm the target board is writable before creating
Back off and retry on bursts — empty create responses often indicate rate limiting

When it happens

Trigger: The PinResource/create call completes but returns null/undefined or an object without `id` — e.g. Pinterest returned an error payload, a redirect/empty body due to session expiry, a silent moderation rejection (spam/blocked domain), or the response shape changed.

Common situations: Expired or invalid session cookies (cookie-based Strategy), image URL blocked by Pinterest spam filters so the pin is dropped, board id resolved incorrectly, Pinterest DOM/API changes breaking the resource-call extraction, rate limiting returning empty responses.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of jackwener/OpenCLI@49907e53dc (2026-08-29). Data as JSON: /api/errors/e1e218c6912be9d9. Report an issue: GitHub.