I’m implementing authentication in a React app using Auth0 (via auth0-lock). When my site loads, I call lock.checkSession() to check if a user is logged in and fetch their profile via lock.getUserInfo(). This works as expected for authenticated users.
However, for unauthenticated users, checkSession() throws a Failed Silent Auth: login_required error. While this makes sense, it’s flooding our logs with noise.
Current Flow:
On page load, call lock.checkSession().
If successful, fetch profile data with lock.getUserInfo().
If it fails (e.g., no session), proceed without user data.
Problem:
The login_required error occurs for every unauthenticated visitor, cluttering logs.
Questions:
Is there a recommended way to check if a user is logged in without triggering checkSession() for unauthenticated users?
Or is there a way to suppress this specific error in Auth0 logs?
Any guidance on best practices for session checks while minimizing log noise would be appreciated!
Thank you for posting your question on the Auth0 Community!
As mentioned in our Auth0-JS Documentation:
The checkSession method allows you to acquire a new token from Auth0 for a user who is already authenticated against Auth0 for your domain. The method accepts any valid OAuth2 parameters that would normally be sent to authorize. If you omit them, it will use the ones provided when initializing Auth0.
Since you call checkSession() when the page loads instead after an user is authenticated, that is why you receive that error.
Since you are using React, I would advise to use the isAuthenticated() method in order to check if the page has an active session with Auth0.
I’m implementing authentication in my application using auth0-lock (not the @auth0/auth0-react package). I’m struggling to find documentation or examples for persisting authenticated sessions when the page reloads.
From investigating the auth0-react source code (reference), I see they use checkSession() for session recovery. However, I need to implement this functionality directly with auth0-lock (and avoid cluttering logs).
What I’ve tried:
Searched Auth0 documentation and examples for auth0-lock session persistence
Reviewed auth0-lock configuration options for session-related parameters
Questions:
Is there an equivalent method to checkSession() when using auth0-lock?
Could you provide an example of implementing session restoration with auth0-lock?
Are there any official documentation references for session management specifically with auth0-lock?
I’m particularly interested in maintaining authenticated state after page reloads/refreshes without redirecting to Auth0 again.
Indeed, the documentation for Auth0 Lock appears to be quite scarce.
From your initial post, I understand that you want to load your page regardless if an user is authenticated or not. Since checkSession()method allows you to acquire a new token from Auth0 for a user who is already authenticated against Auth0 for your domain you receive an error if they are unauthenticated. For this, you could handle the error then redirect the user to the page. An example on using the checkSession() is available in the Github documentation.
lock.checkSession({}, function (error, authResult) {
if (error || !authResult) {
lock.show();
} else {
// user has an active session, so we can use the accessToken directly.
lock.getUserInfo(authResult.accessToken, function (error, profile) {
console.log(error, profile);
});
}
});
Also, you can check this community post regarding a similar issue as the one you are experiencing.
If your implementation is similar to the one provided above and the following documentation was not helpful, could you post a snippet of your implementation and of your checkSession() function to take a look?
I’m working on a website where pages load independently of user authentication. Auth0 is only used when a user wants to leave a comment on an article. The site should be accessible to all users, regardless of whether they are authenticated or not. Authentication is explicitly triggered when a user clicks the “Login” button or attempts to leave a comment.
To achieve this, I’m using the following function to check the authentication state (on page load):
function getAuthState() {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
lock.checkSession({}, (error, authResult) => {
if (error) {
reject(error);
return;
}
if (authResult) {
lock.getUserInfo(authResult.accessToken, (error, profile) => {
if (error) {
reject(error);
return;
}
resolve({ authResult, profile });
});
} else {
reject(new Error('Undefined authResult'));
}
});
});
}
This function works correctly and allows me to determine whether a user session is active or not. If the session is inactive, I don’t call lock.show() because authentication is not required for general site access.
However, this approach results in a large number of “Failed Silent Auth” (login_required) messages in the Auth0 logs. While this makes sense (since most users are not authenticated when they visit the site), it clutters the logs and might indicate potential issues with my implementation.
My questions are:
Could this implementation lead to potential problems in the future?
How can I reduce or eliminate the “Failed Silent Auth” messages in the logs without compromising functionality?
Are there any best practices I should follow to improve this implementation?
Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Regarding the best practices, I would recommend to view our documentation about Error Handling.
As mentioned in the documentation, you can encapsulate each check method that you are performing in try{}.....catch{} and handling the exceptions accordingly. Whenever the Failed Silent Auth error occurs, you can just ignore it, otherwise, log any other error since you seem to reject all errors at this time.
Otherwise, your implementation should not affect your performance or compromise the functionality.