How to diagnose an Unknown Error during login to your Sourcegraph instance

This document will attempt to identify a common reason for an Unknown Error when attempting to login using a username and password to your organizations Sourcegraph instance.

Prerequisites

  • This document assumes that Sourcegraph is set up and you are trying to login via an existing username and password
  • For the step to check the site config, you will need to ask your organizations site-admin to check for you (this may not be required)

Steps to identify and remedy

Symptoms

  1. You are attempting to login with your username and password and see an Unknown Error message above the username and password boxes

  2. This is often a result of an http/https protocol mismatch between what is in the site configuration for externalURL, and what the user is trying to log in to

    • For example, if the protocol in the site configuration is set to https://sourcegraph.your_instance_name.com
    • And the user is trying to login at the http://sourcegraph.your_instance_name.com, then this error can be displayed

Things to check

  1. Check your Browsers URL bar for a message such as Not Secure indicating that you are trying to authenticate via http instead of https

    • For example, on a Chrome browser you would see the message on the top left hand corner of the URL bar

  2. If you were trying to login with http protocol, try again with https instead

  3. If you are still having issues, you can ask a site-admin to double check the externalURL configured in the Site configuration so you have the correct login landing page

Further resources