lfnovo/open-notebook · error · HTTPException

Error creating chat session: {str(e)}

Error message

Error creating chat session: {str(e)}

What it means

Generic 500 from POST /chat/sessions when session creation fails unexpectedly (not NotFound/HTTP/OpenNotebookError). Original cause is logged as 'Error creating chat session: ...'.

Source

Thrown at api/routers/chat.py:175

        return ChatSessionResponse(
            id=session.id or "",
            title=session.title or "",
            notebook_id=request.notebook_id,
            created=str(session.created),
            updated=str(session.updated),
            message_count=0,
            model_override=session.model_override,
        )
    except NotFoundError:
        raise HTTPException(status_code=404, detail="Notebook not found")
    except HTTPException:
        raise
    except OpenNotebookError:
        raise
    except Exception as e:
        logger.error(f"Error creating chat session: {str(e)}")
        raise HTTPException(
            status_code=500, detail=f"Error creating chat session: {str(e)}"
        )


@router.get(
    "/chat/sessions/{session_id}", response_model=ChatSessionWithMessagesResponse
)
async def get_session(session_id: str):
    """Get a specific session with its messages."""
    try:
        # Get session (normalizes the ID and 404s if missing)
        full_session_id, session = await get_session_or_404(session_id)

        # Get session state from LangGraph to retrieve messages
        # Use sync get_state() in a thread since SqliteSaver doesn't support async
        thread_state = await asyncio.to_thread(
            chat_graph.get_state,
            config=RunnableConfig(configurable={"thread_id": full_session_id}),

View on GitHub (pinned to a7de90d38a)

Solutions

  1. Check API logs for the exact underlying exception
  2. Confirm SurrealDB is up and migrations ran on API startup
  3. Validate model_override against the configured providers before posting
Defensive patterns

Strategy: retry

Try / catch

catch (e) { if (e.status === 500 && isTransient(e)) retry(); else surfaceError(e); }

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: ChatSession.save() failing due to DB connectivity loss, schema constraint violations, or an invalid model_override value rejected at persist time.

Common situations: SurrealDB down or restarted, schema migration didn't run (table definition missing), passing an unsupported model id in model_override.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of lfnovo/open-notebook@a7de90d38a (2026-08-27). Data as JSON: /api/errors/b195c0fb3a827052. Report an issue: GitHub.