Upgrading to 3.8.X breaks some installs. How to fix it and what caused it.

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Upgrading to 3.8.X breaks some installs. How to fix it and what caused it.

If you are reading this, chances are that you are one of the lucky ones that were affected by a change in the latest release. The change was not a bug but rather fixing a bug from prior versions. We have had a lot of response for from people stating that WP OAuth Server stopped working after upgrading to version 3.8.X from 3.7.X. After looking into the issue we found that it to be caused by a configuration setting.

Prior to 3.8, WP OAuth Server did not listen to the JWT option as it was not supported. In 3.8 and up, we had fixed this issue. It is common for people during testing and development to turn on all settings to make sure they do not miss anything. Unfortunately, this caused a lot of headaches because the option “JWT” was checked prior to the upgrade. When users upgraded, the site started presenting JWT as the access token.

Since JWT is not meant to be used as an access token, the authorization requests were failing. JWT is already signed and the user data is already in the JSON Web Token.

How to fix the issue if you were affected

Visit the plugins settings page and uncheck the JWT option in the settings. Ensure to save the changes and your install should be good to go.