Nativefier: External login pages open in external browser, breaking login or asking users to know about --internal-urls. Nativefier should automatically open those internally.

[DionGrendelman]

Description

Hello i'm trying to use nativefier to login into my youtube music,
But when i click login it opens browser, i login. and nothing happens.

Steps to reproduce issue

Install it with music.youtube.com

Details

• Are you nativefying a public website? Yes
• Feature request? Have you looked at nativefier --help to see if an existing option could fit your needs?
• Full nativefier command used to build your app: nativefier music.youtube.com
• Version of Nativefier (run nativefier --version): Current
• Version of node.js (run node --version): current
• OS: win 10 64b
• Error message / stack trace (if any):

[luccasclezar]

You have to add the Google SignIn url to the internal urls of the app. Use this command:

nativefier music.youtube.com --internal-urls "(.*?)(accounts\.google\.com/ServiceLogin|music\.youtube\.com)(.*?)"

With this command you are basically saying that if the url contains "accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin" or "music.youtube.com", it should open inside the app. If you want to add another one, just add the 'other' symbol (|) after "music.youtube.com" and add the wanted url (without "https://", as the other ones) after it. But remember to escape the dots with a backslash as they mean 'any character' in Regex.

Hope it helps :)

[ronjouch]

Thanks @luccasclezar 🙂.

There are lots of similar reports with various sites. A default list of domain / internal-urls pairs, used automatically when nativefying, would be neat. Renaming issue. Help welcome!

[luccasclezar]

You're welcome @ronjouch! 🙂

About the fix, wouldn't it be better to add a default list of authentication domains that every nativefied app uses as internal urls? Like Google, Microsoft, Github, etc.

Cause I was thinking about this list of domain / internal-urls pairs and it seems to me that it would be too hard-coded. If all auth domains' urls are internalized, it should be a broader alternative as the list would not be that long and would work with every site that uses these auth providers without the need to hard-code each domain individually.

The only problem with this method that I can think of is the performance of the Regex search (and only because I don't have enough experience with it to know how long the domain list would need to be to slow down the search considerably).

What do you think of this implementation?

[ronjouch]

"wouldn't it be better to add a default list of authentication domains that every nativefied app uses as internal urls? Like Google, Microsoft, Github, etc."

@luccasclezar I'm not sure, it feels like room for lots of false positives 😕.

[allo-]

Isn't this kind of an idea for a second project, which collects nativefier command lines for popular websites?

The first idea I had was "this is something which should not matter, as someone creates a working app once and everybody uses it", but I guess quite a few people here want to nativefy them theirself, so they can trust the binaries. So a collection of command lines would make a nice repo, possibly with a simple script asking Which site do you want to nativefy from a template? 1) youtube 2) spotify 3) ...? [Enter a number]

[luccasclezar]

@ronjouch I don't quite get it how there could be false positives. If the auth urls shared their domain with other sites (like Google SignIn having the same domain as another Google site) I would agree with you, but everytime someone access accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin it is to Login with Google. I can't think of any false positives in this situation.

But even if there are some false positives, we could simply have a parameter to remove the default auth domains, like nativefier youtube.com --no-default-auth-urls. This way if someone had a false positive (which I think it would be rare), it's possible to workaround it.

My main concern about having a list of pairs is that there will always have some sites that won't be in the list and will have to be manually set. In my opinion, the number of people that would have false positives with my suggestion would be far less than the number of people that would have to manually set an auth domain to a random site they want nativefied.

What do you think?

[luccasclezar]

I liked @allo-'s idea. And perhaps it would be nice if there was a site or a repository of already compiled binaries of common sites with custom styling (like MacOS's appbar blended with the page's styling, etc).

[bacongravy]

I started a personal project along those lines: https://github.com/bacongravy/nativefier-apps

It’s very specific to how I wanted to build the apps; not everyone is going to be using okta for login, for instance. But it could be forked and made more generic.

The app-specific settings are in here: https://github.com/bacongravy/nativefier-apps/blob/master/apps.json

[ronjouch]

This sounds like an extension of what's already been done for icons by sister project jiahaog/nativefier-icons . Would be cool!

@bacongravy, @luccasclezar, anyone: feel free to step up and do it, extending & reworking [nativefier, nativefier-icons] to use an "Apps repo" at an URL you control, then when a proof of concept is established I'm sure @jiahaog will be happy to pull that into nativefier-icons (on which I have no access).

[luccasclezar]

Ok @ronjouch, I'll give it a look and see what I can do in my spare time 😁

But just to remind you, you didn't answer my question regarding the auth domains issue.

[bacongravy]

Another approach would be to change the default regex for internal urls to be something more like /.*/. In terms of trade-offs, it seems to me to be better to live with external urls opening in Nativefier by default than it does to be unable to log-in to some sites by default.

[bacongravy]

Or, we could back out #624, I think that's the change that started trigging this problem for some people. What if we put that behavior behind a --strict-internal flag that wasn't enabled by default?

[luccasclezar]

@bacongravy In my opinion, the best outcome would be to stay the way it is but to open the auth providers internally by default. I know that would mean we would have to manually add every auth provider we know and possibly add more if someone requested or we discovered a new one, but I don't think that opening all urls internally would be a better choice as a nativefied app should be the closest possible to what a native app would be.

[bfelbo]

I'm new to nativefier and I just spent hours struggling with this. Apparently, Github 2 factor auth only works for me when opening as a separate tab (unlike for my coworker).

The developer of the website I was nativefying had never heard of nativefier and definitely hadn't considered released a native app using it. It would be awesome if the most common auth domains could be opened as tabs by default.

[PhantomNimbi]

What would be the proper internal url string for "https://www.amazon.com/ap/signin|https://www.audible.com"

Trying to get Audible to open both the login and redirects within the app and although this works I notice it probably isn't entirely correct in format....

I've tried it as "(.*?)(accounts\.amazon\.com/ServiceLogin|\.audible\.com)(.*?)" but that only broke the app.

Here's the error it gives
https://i.imgur.com/ntXTlar.png

nvm... I got it to work with the above code, looks like the error was due to manually editing it into the nativefier.json file after having created it, lol.

[ronjouch]

About the fix, wouldn't it be better to add a default list of authentication domains that every nativefied app uses as internal urls? Like Google, Microsoft, Github, etc.

@luccasclezar or anyone: I changed my mind about that, it would be cool, and can be simple to start with, with a list of common auth domains/regexes (google, microsoft, github, etc) to match and to always consider internal, and with logging informing the user about it. PR welcome.

[bacongravy]

The following globs capture the authentication domains/paths I know about from this thread:

www.amazon.com/ap/signin
www.google.com/accounts
accounts.google.com/
*.okta.com/

What else would we want in the initial list?

[bfelbo]

I think you'd also want to add GitHub, which is used as sign-in for many tools.

Perhaps also LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook if you want to support non-developer websites.

[bacongravy]

Those all sound good to me. If someone knows the domain names / URLs for them please add them to this thread.

[avlm]

Hi! Today I tried to nativefy Notion, got the same problem while using google to log in. Here's the command I used:

nativefier --name "Notion" --internal-urls "(.*?)(accounts\.google\.com/ServiceLogin|notion\.so)(.*?)" --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:76.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/76.0" "notion.so"

It didn't work, even if I use --internal-urls and --user-agent

Appreciate any help, I'm going to create a password so I can log in without google services, but use google or other services to log in is a great convenience.

Available to help with anything I can.

Thanks!

[CocoThePimp]

Hi! Today I tried to nativefy Notion, got the same problem while using google to log in. Here's the command I used:

nativefier --name "Notion" --internal-urls "(.*?)(accounts\.google\.com/ServiceLogin|notion\.so)(.*?)" --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:76.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/76.0" "notion.so"

It didn't work, even if I use --internal-urls and --user-agent

Appreciate any help, I'm going to create a password so I can log in without google services, but use google or other services to log in is a great convenience.

Available to help with anything I can.

Thanks!

I got the same issue, but if you sign up with google, and then create a new account (with password) with the same google's email, it will be linked ;). So it's fine !

[jharohit466]

This method worked for me
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62128548/how-to-force-to-open-all-links-in-same-window-in-nativefier

Short Example (What I did):

GOTO> /home/username/Nativefier-Apps/YouTube/
GOTO> resources folder for me it is inside YouTube-linux-x64 under YouTube folder
GOTO> app open nativefier.json with any text editor [I used Visual Studio Code]
FIND> "internalUrls" and replace null with the list of URL you want to open internally e.g "(.*?contacts\\.google\\.com.*?|.*?accounts\\.google\\.com*?)"

I'm not sure if I can post it here. But I thought this may help contributors or developers.