Repository navigation
Hardcoded Chrome/120 User-Agent is rejected by some feeds (403 → "cannot_connect") #7
Description
Version: A better Feedparser 1.2.0
What happens
Adding https://aidoende.nl/AI/feed.xml fails in the config flow with cannot_connect. The feed itself is valid RSS 2.0 with 30 items.
The cause is the hardcoded User-Agent in const.py:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
The site's server (Apache) blocks this outdated Chrome version and returns 403 Forbidden – Request forbidden by administrative rules. async_validate_feed then turns that into cannot_connect, so the reason is not visible to the user.
Reproduction
curl -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" https://aidoende.nl/AI/feed.xml
# 403
curl -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/140.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" https://aidoende.nl/AI/feed.xml
# 200
Mozilla/5.0 on its own, feedparser's own User-Agent and Home Assistant's own User-Agent all get 200 as well. Changing only Chrome/120.0.0.0 to Chrome/140.0.0.0 in const.py fixes it locally.
Suggestions
- Update the default User-Agent. Better still, make it configurable in the options flow (or use an honest UA such as
HomeAssistant-Feedparser/<version>), because a frozen browser string will keep going stale. - Show HTTP status errors (403/404) in the config flow, instead of mapping them to
cannot_connect.
Thanks for the integration!
(written with the help of AI)
Activity
Merge pull request #8 from timmaurice/fix/7-user-agent
timmaurice commentedon Sep 25, 2026
@DJGizbo thanks a lot for this report, and for the clear reproduction with both curl commands. It made the cause easy to confirm.
Both of your suggestions are in 1.3.0:
HomeAssistant-Feedparser. That means a feed keeps working even when the browser string ages again.https://aidoende.nl/AI/feed.xmlcan be added now.Update through HACS and add the feed again; nothing else needs changing.