"Couldn't sign you in" Google account login fails in headless mode in Google Cloud Functions

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to make a script that would login to Medium to export article’s stats. Medium allows Google authentication so I’m using that. It runs without any issue on my laptop (MacOS) but I get the message (attached to this issue) that I couldn’t sign in when run in Google Cloud Functions. Basically this login failure message appears after the screen where you enter your username.

• Puppeteer version: 1.18.1 (also tested with 1.19.0, same result)
• Platform / OS version: Google Cloud Functions
• Node.js version: 8

What steps will reproduce the problem?

I deployed the code below to Google Cloud Functions.

exports.exportMediumStats = (req, res) => {
  const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
  const url = "https://medium.com/m/signin?redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F&operation=login";
  let image;

  // Main function that will scrap Medium stats page using puppeteer
  async function main() {
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
      headless: true,
      args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-setuid-sandbox'],
    });
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: "networkidle2" });
    console.log('Clicking on google login...');
    await page.click('.button--withChrome.button--large');
    await page.mainFrame().waitForSelector('#identifierId');
    console.log('Typing email...');
    await page.type('#identifierId', process.env.MEDIUM_USERNAME);
    await page.mainFrame().waitForSelector('#identifierNext');
    console.log('Clicking next button...');
    await page.click('#identifierNext');
    await page.waitFor(3000);
    image = await page.screenshot(); 

    console.log('Closing browser...');
    await browser.close();
  }

  main()
  .then(url => {
    res.setHeader("content-type", "image/jpeg");
    res.status(200).send(image);
  })
  .catch(err => {
    console.error(err);
    res.status(500).send("An Error occured" + err);  
  })
};

What is the expected result? I should get the screen where I would type my password. I works perfectly on my local machine in both non-headless and headless modes. Also it used to work on Google Cloud Functions at the beginning but it doesn’t for some time now.

What happens instead? The login fails with a message displayed in the attached picture below. The failure message is:

Couldn't sign you in
For your protection, you can't sign in from this device.
Try again later, or sign in from another device.

[VladymyrPylypchatin]

Hey. I was able to solve the problem!

I am running my script on Digital Ocean Droplet with Ubuntu 18

1. I followed this instruction https://github.com/berstend/puppeteer-extra/tree/master/packages/puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth

2. Then I installed xvfb https://www.npmjs.com/package/xvfb to run puppeteer in headfull mode

Then the most important. Without these steps, Google will still block you.

1. I installed chrome instance via command line

2. Launch browser with chrome-launcher package

Code example

        const puppeteer = require("puppeteer-extra")
        const pluginStealth = require("puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth")
        puppeteer.use(pluginStealth())
        const chromeLauncher = require('chrome-launcher');
        const axios = require('axios');
        const Xvfb = require('xvfb');

        const xvfb = new Xvfb();
        xvfb.startSync();
        const chromeConfig = {
                chromePath: "/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable"
        }

        const chrome = await chromeLauncher.launch(chromeConfig);
        const response = await axios.get(`http://localhost:${chrome.port}/json/version`);
        const { webSocketDebuggerUrl } = response.data;
        const browser = await puppeteer.connect({ browserWSEndpoint: webSocketDebuggerUrl });
        
        //log in into google account....

Good luck! 😃

[VladymyrPylypchatin]

Hi! I have got the same problem. I run puppeteer in the non-headless mode and also implemented the recommendation from this article https://intoli.com/blog/making-chrome-headless-undetectable/ After all the steps, I still receive this message.

Is anyone have a solution to this problem? I would really appreciate any help.

Have a nice day 😃