Title: OAuth2 Credentials Removed from Chromium
Author: Jason A. Donenfeld <zx2c4@gentoo.org>
Posted: 2021-08-11
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: www-client/chromium
In March of this year, Google announced that OAuth2 credentials would be revoked
for distros shipping Chromium. This was covered in multiple places at the time,
such as [1,2,3]. Around that time, with 89.0.4389.82, Gentoo removed OAuth2
credentials from its packages. However, they slipped back in shortly after.
As a result, some users [4] have found that recently Google's SSO does not
persist between browser sessions; e.g. you have to log back into GMail every
time you open your browser. This week's changes [5] restore the old behavior
we had in March, of not shipping Gentoo OAuth2 credentials.
If you find that certain Google services are no longer working, you may wish to
supply OAuth2 credentials manually, obtained by following the instructions at
[6]. However, even without supplying such credentials, Google's SSO should now
be working as expected.
There are now two options for passing these credentials to Chromium via
/etc/chromium/default:
1. GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_SECRET environment
variables:
export GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_ID="<client-id>"
export GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_SECRET="<client-secret>"
2. --oauth2-client-id and --oauth2-client-secret= command line switches:
CHROMIUM_FLAGS+=" --oauth2-client-id=<client-id>"
CHROMIUM_FLAGS+=" --oauth2-client-secret=<client-secret>"
Alternatively these environment variables and command line switches may be given
at the command line for ad-hoc testing.
[1] https://archlinux.org/news/chromium-losing-sync-support-in-early-march/
[2] https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2021-48866282e5
[3] https://hackaday.com/2021/01/26/whats-the-deal-with-chromium-on-linux-google-at-odds-with-package-maintainers/
[4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/791871
[5] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=fce48ef271bbcaee9afdf0481294da167e665a9b
[6] http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys
