kenneth_larsen
Community Champion

OAuth Invalid/Unknown Client Error

Are developer credentials from Canvas limited to a particular Canvas shard?

Okay, so this one has really stumped me. I have some LTI applications that are being used by a variety of institutions on a variety of Canvas instances. I was working with an institution to install one of the tools and I keep getting the following error from the https://<institution>.instructure.com/login/oauth2/auth page:

     {

          "error": "invalid_client",

          "error_description": "unknown client",

          "message": "invalid client_id"

     }

Has anyone encountered this before or know how to go about diagnosing the issue?

Here is some additional information that may be helpful:

  • My client ID is correct in the URL.
  • My developer credentials came through Instructure (not those you can now generate at the institution level).
  • My developer credentials have been used successfully in 6+ different Canvas instances.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Labels (1)
4 Replies
stephen_isenber
Community Novice

So, ran into this issue as well. In my case it appears the instance I was working on is self-hosted, and I needed the Admin to create a developer key the allows access to my client ID.

How do I add a developer key for an account? | Canvas Admin Guide | Canvas Guides

Not sure this is valid for your case though, as I see your note below:

  • My developer credentials came through Instructure (not those you can now generate at the institution level)

The main difference again is the instance I am working on is out of the norm as a self-hosted Canvas instance.

Thanks for you input  @stephen_isenber ​. It is nice to know that this issue will also arise on a self-hosted instance. While the instance I am working with is not self-hosted, it is not a typical Canvas instance so the core issue may be the same.

Hi there,

We've also encountered this error message when self-hosted Canvas instances attempt to connect to Badgr. We've narrowed it down to an incorrectly entered developer key or secret or that Redis had not been installed. I am curious to hear more about how others have encountered or resolved this issue.  Thank you!

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Hello Stephen,
Thanks for your research on this, it's helped me out. I've gotten myself a developer key now, but I'm wondering how I might apply that to my routes? Where exactly should my clients put this developer key? In the route::get that redirects to the authentication page, perhaps?

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