santifer/career-ops · error · Error

wttj: invalid URL

Error message

wttj: invalid URL: ${url}

What it means

wttj's assertHost pins a URL to an expected HTTPS host. If the URL cannot be parsed by the URL constructor at all (malformed input), it throws 'invalid URL' before any protocol/host checks. This is the provider's first line of URL validation.

Solutions

  1. Print/inspect the offending url string from the error message and fix its syntax
  2. Add the https:// scheme if it is missing
  3. Validate careers_url values in config before loading the provider

Example fix

// before
const url = 'apply.wttj.io/acme/jobs';
// after
const url = 'https://apply.wttj.io/acme/jobs';
Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

function isParseableUrl(u) { try { new URL(u); return true; } catch { return false; } }
if (!isParseableUrl(entry.careers_url)) throw new Error(`bad careers_url: ${entry.careers_url}`);

Type guard

const isParseableUrl = (u) => { try { new URL(u); return typeof u === 'string' && u.length > 0; } catch { return false; } };

Try / catch

try { return wttjFetch(url); } catch (e) { if (e.message.startsWith('wttj: invalid URL')) { console.error(`Malformed URL in config: ${e.message}`); return null; } throw e; }

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: assertHost called with a malformed string — missing scheme, spaces, unescaped characters, or a non-URL value passed where a URL is expected.

Common situations: A careers_url in config with a typo or missing protocol ('apply.wttj.io/jobs'); a truncated URL copied from a document; an interpolated URL built from an empty slug.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid URL" errors: why new URL(), URI.parse, and reqwest::Url reject your string — missing scheme, whitespace, and bad path format — this error's family across 39 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of santifer/career-ops@aac998c7ed (2026-09-16). Data as JSON: /api/errors/6de7395a9a37a849. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at providers/wttj.mjs:63

const INDEX = 'wttj_jobs_production_en';
const DEFAULT_MAX_HITS = 100;
const MAX_HITS_CAP = 200;
// An unfiltered keyword query matches a large slice of a global board — "product
// manager" alone returns ~14k hits — so Algolia's own relevance ranking, not the
// scanner's filters, decides which 200 are seen. A server-side `filters`
// expression cuts the result set to something a single request can actually
// exhaust (e.g. product-management + France + full_time is ~450), so the cap is
// raised to Algolia's per-request ceiling for this index when one is configured.
const FILTERED_MAX_HITS_CAP = 1000;
const FILTERS_MAX_LEN = 1000;

/** Pin a URL to an expected https host. */
function assertHost(url, host, label) {
  let parsed;
  try {
    parsed = new URL(url);
  } catch {
    throw new Error(`wttj: invalid URL: ${url}`);
  }
  if (parsed.protocol !== 'https:') throw new Error(`wttj: URL must use HTTPS: ${url}`);
  if (parsed.hostname !== host.toLowerCase()) {
    throw new Error(`wttj: untrusted ${label} hostname "${parsed.hostname}" — must be ${host}`);
  }
  return url;
}

/**
 * Parse the `window.env = {...}` payload served by /api/env and extract the
 * Algolia application id + client search key.
 * @param {string} text
 * @returns {{ appId: string, apiKey: string }}
 */
export function parseEnvPayload(text) {
  const start = text.indexOf('{');
  const end = text.lastIndexOf('}');
  if (start === -1 || end <= start) throw new Error('wttj: /api/env payload has no JSON object');

View on GitHub (pinned to aac998c7ed)