Only use the base URL during onboarding if the URL is Nabu Casa

[dshokouhi]

Summary

Noticed that during onboarding if a user enters a URL with say the lovelace path like a dashboard from a bookmark then the frontend will not present the correct login screen. This in turn means the app does not save any data upon exit and the user needs to onboard again. Even the Companion App menu item is missing.

example: https://example.com/lovelace/home

With this change we now force the URL to be just the base URL, there may be a better way to construct the actual base URL but this is what I found as of now :)

Fixes: #2220

Screenshots

Link to pull request in Documentation repository

Documentation: home-assistant/companion.home-assistant#

Any other notes

Ref: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/new-android-device-does-not-keep-connection-info-between-uses-with-the-companion-app/382766/25?u=dshokouhi

CC: @bramkragten - I am not sure if its correct that the frontend is serving the incorrect login page. Notice in the screenshot how the user is prompted to save the login.

CC: @home-assistant/ios-developers - in case a similar fix should be applied elsewhere. I am not sure if iOS also looks at the URL to remove everything but the base URL. I imagine its a common use case for users to copy and paste the URL if discovery did not work.

[jpelgrom]

This conflicts with #1651, but isn't a major issue in my opinion as HA doesn't support installs in subdirectories and the app cannot properly support reverse proxies.

there may be a better way to construct the actual base URL

HttpUrl.Builder? It's already used when adding segments and after onboarding completes when saving URLs.

val url = base.toHttpUrl()
HttpUrl.Builder()
    .scheme(url.scheme)
    .host(url.host)
    .port(url.port)
    .addPathSegments("auth/authorize")
    .addEncodedQueryParameter("response_type", "code")
    .addEncodedQueryParameter("client_id", AuthenticationService.CLIENT_ID)
    .addEncodedQueryParameter("redirect_uri", AUTH_CALLBACK)
    .build()
    .toString()

[dshokouhi]

This conflicts with #1651, but isn't a major issue in my opinion as HA doesn't support installs in subdirectories and the app cannot properly support reverse proxies.

hmm in that case we may need to close that request then, in that case the HA frontend would really need to handle the login page properly so we can drop this change. Until then though I think its more user friendly to keep this change as I can see the copy and pasting happening more often than reported.

HttpUrl.Builder? It's already used when adding segments and after onboarding completes when saving URLs.

thank you 🙏

[jpelgrom]

This in turn means the app does not save any data upon exit and the user needs to onboard again. Even the Companion App menu item is missing.

Decided to replicate the described issue: onboarding never completes which is why nothing is saved and menu item isn't shown. Same issue applies to the iOS app but it is more obvious that onboarding doesn't complete there because of the sheet design.

[dshokouhi]

This in turn means the app does not save any data upon exit and the user needs to onboard again. Even the Companion App menu item is missing.

Decided to replicate the described issue: onboarding never completes which is why nothing is saved and menu item isn't shown. Same issue applies to the iOS app but it is more obvious that onboarding doesn't complete there because of the sheet design.

Yea it seems that when this issue occurs not even the external bus communicates with the app. Seems like maybe a frontend change could be needed but the fix here should prevent the issue from occurring in the frontend since we load the correct auth page.

[jpelgrom]

not even the external bus communicates with the app

That's not implemented in the onboarding webview.

Seems like maybe a frontend change could be needed but the fix here should prevent the issue from occurring in the frontend since we load the correct auth page.

While this PR does prevent the issue from happening, it might break non-standard setups which is why I'm conflicted on whether we should do this or change the frontend instead.

[dshokouhi]

not even the external bus communicates with the app

That's not implemented in the onboarding webview.

oh duh, we never leave that webview 😅

Seems like maybe a frontend change could be needed but the fix here should prevent the issue from occurring in the frontend since we load the correct auth page.

While this PR does prevent the issue from happening, it might break non-standard setups which is why I'm conflicted on whether we should do this or change the frontend instead.

@bramkragten what are your thoughts on how to best proceed here? Seems iOS also has this issue so a frontend fix is probably most beneficial.

[dshokouhi]

We should probably come up with a decision here as I am still finding myself helping users who keep hitting this issue. Here is the latest behavior described by a user.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/new-samsung-phone-ha-app-get-to-loading-data-then-blank-screen/560420

[JBassett]

Doing this will break anyone who hosts HA on a path. If this was the root: https://example.com/ha then we would try to auth at https://example.com/auth/authorize instead of the correct https://example.com/ha/auth/authorize

[felipecrs]

I have a suggestion:

1. frontend to support a magic query parameter on any route, and when present, redirect to auth. Examples:
   a. https://ha:8123/my-dashboard/?redirect-to-auth (frontend should parse and redirect to https://ha:8123/auth)
   b. https://ha:8123/ha/any/given/path?redirect-to-auth (frontend should parse and redirect to https://ha:8123/ha/auth)
2. The app to automatically append ?redirect-to-auth when attempting to first login.

[dshokouhi]

thanks for the suggestion @felipecrs I think at this point we need to first wait for the frontend to do their part and let us know what if anything we need to do on our end.

I am going to close this PR as the approach is not correct per the comment above.

[dshokouhi]

Reopening this PR as we are going to target NC URLs only here

[jpelgrom]

Could you rebase this? Even if there are no merge conflicts, it is based on the last commit before multiserver so good to test with a more recent code base 😅

[jpelgrom]

Now to deduplicate code, you could do something like:

// First create the builder either from scratch for NC or from the input otherwise
val builder = if (url.host.endsWith("ui.nabu.casa", true)) {
    HttpUrl.Builder().scheme(url.scheme).host(url.host).port(url.port)
} else {
    url.newBuilder()
}
// Then continue with the common parts
builder.addPathSegments("auth/authorize")
// etc

(sorry if this is a lot of small steps, thinking of it as we go)

[dshokouhi]

(sorry if this is a lot of small steps, thinking of it as we go)

no worries appreciate the help and guidance :)

[jpelgrom]

Good to have for HA Cloud, which is the only standardised network setup