v2 after brief IRC discussion
---
Title: OAuth2 Credentials Removed from Chromium
Author: Jason A. Donenfeld
Posted: 2021-08-08
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. Today'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 set these flags, obtaining
credentials by following the instructions at [6]. However, even without
supplying such credentials, Google's SSO now should be working as expected.
There are now two options for passing these tokens 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
