jackwener/OpenCLI · error · CommandExecutionError

Twitter device-follow returned non-JSON response: ${data.det

Error message

Twitter device-follow returned non-JSON response: ${data.detail || 'unknown parse error'}

What it means

The in-page fetch of the device-follow GraphQL endpoint wraps response parsing; when the body cannot be parsed as JSON it reports errorKind 'non_json' with a detail string, which the Node side rethrows as a CommandExecutionError. This indicates the endpoint answered, but not with the expected JSON payload.

Source

Thrown at clis/twitter/device-follow.js:160

            'X-Csrf-Token': ct0,
            'X-Twitter-Auth-Type': 'OAuth2Session',
            'X-Twitter-Active-User': 'yes',
        });
        const data = await page.evaluate(`async () => {
        try {
          const r = await fetch("${apiUrl}", { method: "GET", headers: ${headers}, credentials: 'include' });
          if (!r.ok) return { error: r.status };
          try {
            return await r.json();
          } catch (e) {
            return { errorKind: 'non_json', detail: String(e && e.message || e) };
          }
        } catch (e) {
          return { errorKind: 'exception', detail: String(e && e.message || e) };
        }
      }`);
        if (data?.errorKind === 'non_json') {
            throw new CommandExecutionError(`Twitter device-follow returned non-JSON response: ${data.detail || 'unknown parse error'}`);
        }
        if (data?.errorKind === 'exception') {
            throw new CommandExecutionError(`Twitter device-follow fetch failed: ${data.detail || 'unknown error'}`);
        }
        if (data?.error) {
            if (data.error === 401 || data.error === 403) {
                throw new AuthRequiredError('x.com', `Twitter device-follow returned HTTP ${data.error}`);
            }
            throw new CommandExecutionError(describeTwitterApiError('device_follow', data.error));
        }
        const parsed = parseDeviceFollow(data, new Set());
        if (!parsed) {
            throw new CommandExecutionError('Twitter device-follow response was missing the expected timeline/globalObjects shape.');
        }
        if (parsed.malformedEntries > 0 || parsed.unmatchedTweetEntries > 0) {
            throw new CommandExecutionError('Twitter device-follow entries could not be joined to tweet/user objects.');
        }
        if (parsed.rows.length === 0) {

View on GitHub (pinned to 49907e53dc)

Solutions

1. Re-run after a delay to rule out a transient rate-limit/interstitial page
2. Confirm the session is authenticated (ct0 cookie present) so x.com does not redirect to a login wall
3. Retry from a different IP / clear cookies to escape bot-detection challenges
4. Inspect data.detail in the message to identify the specific parse failure

// No pre-call check possible; verify session first to reduce login-wall risk
const cookies = await page.getCookies({ url: 'https://x.com' });
if (!cookies.some((c) => c.name === 'ct0')) throw new Error('log in first');

function isJsonObject(text) {
  try { const v = JSON.parse(text); return v !== null && typeof v === 'object'; } catch { return false; }
}

try {
  await cli.twitter.deviceFollow();
} catch (e) {
  if (e instanceof CommandExecutionError && /non-JSON response/.test(e.message)) {
    await sleep(30_000); // back off: likely rate-limit/interstitial page
    return retryOnce();
  }
  throw e;
}

When it happens

Trigger: x.com returning an HTML error/interstitial page (rate-limit wall, login wall, Cloudflare challenge), a network error page, or an empty/redirect response for the device_follow GraphQL request inside the page context.

Common situations: Heavy scraping triggering rate limits or bot-detection interstitials; logged-out or suspicious sessions being redirected to HTML; temporary x.com outages returning error pages instead of GraphQL JSON.

Understand the failure class

• Parsing and encoding errors: unexpected token, malformed input — why parsers reject input and how to find the real culprit.

Related errors

• HTTP ${code}
• Response was not valid JSON: ${url}
• Server returned HTML instead of JSON (status=${response.stat
• 12306 ${endpoint} returned an unexpected payload shape
• 1point3acres request failed: ${error?.message || error}

AI-assisted analysis of jackwener/OpenCLI@49907e53dc (2026-08-29). Data as JSON: /api/errors/0de14334f03dfd66. Report an issue: GitHub.