UrlFetchApp "Exception: Timeout" errors all of a sudden starting April 27, 2021

[Edwin Pankau]

Ever since late morning on April 27, 2021, all of my UrlFetchApp.fetch() calls to my school website's WordPress WooCommerce API are failing with an "Exception: Timeout" error. They had worked fine every hour for years before that.

I can successfully call the same exact API call from Postman with no issues. And, when I look at our WPEngine log, I see a "200" response to the API calls from Google Apps Scripts.

Any ideas what's going on?

Thanks!

[Alex]

So... I would try by creating a simple new script. It is very strange that the Postman (unlike fetch) returns the answer.

[Edwin Pankau]

Good idea. So, I tried just calling UrlFetchApp.fetch("https://google.com"), and it works just fine. Then I tried fetching my school's homepage (not even getting to the WooCommerce API itself), and I get the nasty "Exception: Timeout" error! Makes me think something on the school website's end is blocking calls from google IPs somehow? Postman works just fine for both google.com and my school's homepage URL, of course.

[Joshua Snyder]

I don't have much to add here other than that I've often experienced Postman working whilst calling from a script didn't. In my experience, this was usually related to some CORS issue which Postman somehow got around, not sure that this would be relevant for a Timeout exception though.

[Edwin Pankau]

Well, it’s a really weird timeout exception, as the error is returned within a few seconds, not after a minute or whatever. Further, as I mentioned in my original post, the server logs on the school website side show a 200 response to the request! So strange.

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From: google-apps-sc...@googlegroups.com <google-apps-sc...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Joshua Snyder <jos...@mindful.ai>
Sent: Sunday, May 2, 2021 2:05:37 PM
To: Google Apps Script Community <google-apps-sc...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [Apps-Script] Re: UrlFetchApp "Exception: Timeout" errors all of a sudden starting April 27, 2021

 

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[Tanaike]

Can I ask you about the method for executing your script? You execute the script with the script editor or custom function or others?

[Edwin Pankau]

I execute the script in a custom function that is written in the script editor. It fails when I run it via the script editor’s “debug” tool as well as when I have a time-based trigger call it from Head.

Used to work just fine both ways.

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From: google-apps-sc...@googlegroups.com <google-apps-sc...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Tanaike <kanshi...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 3, 2021 2:22:42 AM

To: Google Apps Script Community <google-apps-sc...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: [Apps-Script] Re: UrlFetchApp "Exception: Timeout" errors all of a sudden starting April 27, 2021

 

Can I ask you about the method for executing your script? You execute the script with the script editor or custom function or others?

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[Tanaike]

Thank you for replying. Although I'm not sure about your actual situation, for example, is this thread in Stackoverflow related to your situation? https://stackoverflow.com/q/63024346

[Edwin Pankau]

Thanks for the link. While your post there didn't address my situation exactly, it did lead me to calling the API from a function in the sheet itself, which led to me checking the console in the browser, which revealed that the actual API error was NOT a timeout (despite what GAS was saying) and was in fact a 401!

{"code":"woocommerce_rest_cannot_view","message":"Sorry, you cannot list resources.","data":{"status":401}}

This didn't make a ton of sense, though, since my authorization had been working for years, and it still worked in Postman. A bit of googling, however, led me to this StackOverflow response from Tony Petruzzi, which miraculously resolved my issue! I have no idea why this would all-of-a-sudden be needed, though.

Needed for WooCommerce API

For future Googlers... I needed to added this to my .htaccess

RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]