[DOCS] Authentication error still showing up

[DiegoRam]

Documentation Problem

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Specific section/line:
I thing there is an issue on instructions since I've used the Chrome dev tool to get the cookie, and logout from my linkedin account on browser and still getting the authentication message error

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Current Documentation

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Problem Description

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[stickerdaniel]

Hey, have you tried setting the same user agent as the web browser you used to log in and extract the cookie?

[DiegoRam]

hi @stickerdaniel ! where exactly i should do that? I can't find on the command the user agent config

[stickerdaniel]

What installation method did you use?
--user-agent {user_agent} - Specify a custom user agent string to prevent anti-scraping detection

[zippeurfou]

@stickerdaniel I can confirm I do have the same consistant error:

14:50:15 - __main__ - ERROR - Failed to initialize driver: Login failed: Cookie authentication failed - cookie may be expired or invalid
14:50:15 - __main__ - ERROR - Driver initialization failed: Login failed: Cookie authentication failed - cookie may be expired or invalid
🔗 LinkedIn MCP Server v1.3.2 🔗
========================================
✅ Authentication ready

❌ Login failed: Cookie authentication failed - cookie may be expired or invalid

I can tell you things I have tried (unsuccessfully) and behavior I am seeing:

1. Tried via docker with setting the linkedin_cookie -> did not work
2. cloning the repo and running uv run main.py --get-cookies -> same error
3. using uv run main.py --no-headless --no-lazy-init --log-level DEBUG providing the cookie -> I do see in the UI it launch chrome and can authenticate but I still get the same error
4. using uv run main.py --no-headless --no-lazy-init --log-level DEBUG providing the user/password -> same behavior, it does redirect chrome to feed page successfully but still error afterwards
5. specify --cookie and --user-agent in the run -> Same it start on login screen then successfully redirect but then I got the error.

The full log in the end looks like this if for example I run in non headless mode with user agent and cookies param:

14:59:56 - __main__ - INFO - 🔗 LinkedIn MCP Server v1.3.2 🔗
14:59:56 - __main__ - DEBUG - Server configuration: AppConfig(chrome=ChromeConfig(headless=False, chromedriver_path=None, browser_args=[], user_agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'), linkedin=LinkedInConfig(email=None, password=None, cookie='redacted'), server=ServerConfig(transport='stdio', transport_explicitly_set=False, lazy_init=False, log_level='DEBUG', get_cookie=False, clear_keychain=False, host='127.0.0.1', port=8000, path='/mcp'), is_interactive=True)
14:59:56 - __main__ - INFO - Using LinkedIn cookie from configuration
14:59:56 - __main__ - INFO - Authentication ready
14:59:56 - __main__ - INFO - Initializing Chrome WebDriver and logging in...
14:59:56 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Initializing Chrome WebDriver...
14:59:56 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Running browser in visible mode
14:59:56 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Using auto-detected ChromeDriver
14:59:57 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Chrome WebDriver initialized successfully
14:59:57 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Attempting cookie authentication...
15:00:15 - drivers.chrome - WARNING - Cookie authentication failed: Cookie login failed - cookie may be expired or invalid
15:00:15 - drivers.chrome - ERROR - Cookie authentication failed
15:00:15 - config.providers - ERROR - Error clearing cookie: Can't delete password in keychain: (-25300, 'Item not found')
15:00:15 - authentication - WARNING - Could not clear authentication from keyring
15:00:15 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Cleared invalid cookie from authentication storage
15:00:15 - __main__ - ERROR - Failed to initialize driver: Login failed: Cookie authentication failed - cookie may be expired or invalid
15:00:15 - __main__ - ERROR - Driver initialization failed: Login failed: Cookie authentication failed - cookie may be expired or invalid
🔗 LinkedIn MCP Server v1.3.2 🔗
========================================
✅ Authentication ready

❌ Login failed: Cookie authentication failed - cookie may be expired or invalid

Please note that I tried with and without 2 step authentification and the error is still the same and I am on mac os.

[stickerdaniel]

Thanks for all that debugging. I’ll investigate this issue. If you’re being redirected successfully, the cookie login itself works, so perhaps it’s just a timing issue. The site took too long to load, and that’s why it throws the authentication failed error. If the cookie is expired, the page simply doesn’t load at all, so after a timeout, it’s just throwing “failed.”

[zippeurfou]

@stickerdaniel this might be the case yes.

[stickerdaniel]

I've pushed a fix in v1.3.3 that increases the cookie authentication timeout from 15 to 30 seconds. This should give LinkedIn more time to process valid cookies and handle their sometimes slow redirects.

Can you try the latest version and see if you're still getting authentication failures? The timeout change should resolve the timing issues you've been experiencing with valid cookies.

Commit: be82650

[zippeurfou]

Thanks, let me try, I have just submitted a PR done by opencode that does execute correctly but I will try your commit as well.

[zippeurfou]

@stickerdaniel ok it seems your fix did not work but the branch I pushed did.
This is the full log with my branch fyi:

17:14:30 - __main__ - DEBUG - Server configuration: AppConfig(chrome=ChromeConfig(headless=False, chromedriver_path=None, browser_args=[], user_agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'), linkedin=LinkedInConfig(email=None, password=None, cookie='{redacted}'), server=ServerConfig(transport='stdio', transport_explicitly_set=False, lazy_init=False, log_level='DEBUG', get_cookie=False, clear_keychain=False, host='127.0.0.1', port=8000, path='/mcp'), is_interactive=True)
17:14:30 - __main__ - INFO - Using LinkedIn cookie from configuration
17:14:30 - __main__ - INFO - Authentication ready
17:14:30 - __main__ - INFO - Initializing Chrome WebDriver and logging in...
17:14:30 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Initializing Chrome WebDriver...
17:14:30 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Running browser in visible mode
17:14:30 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Using auto-detected ChromeDriver
17:14:34 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Chrome WebDriver initialized successfully
17:14:34 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Attempting cookie authentication...
17:14:34 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Cookie value (first 20 chars): {redacted}...
17:14:34 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Cookie length: 152
17:14:34 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Initial URL before login: data:,
17:14:34 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Set page load timeout to 45 seconds
17:14:34 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Calling actions.login() with cookie...
17:14:49 - drivers.chrome - WARNING - actions.login() threw exception after 15.55s: Cookie login failed - cookie may be expired or invalid
17:14:49 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Exception type: InvalidCredentialsError
17:14:49 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Detected InvalidCredentialsError from linkedin-scraper library
17:14:49 - drivers.chrome - INFO - This is a known issue - will verify authentication status manually
17:14:49 - drivers.chrome - INFO - The browser may have logged in successfully despite the exception
17:14:49 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - URL immediately after login attempt: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
17:14:49 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Waiting 3 seconds for page stabilization...
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - URL after 3-second stabilization wait: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Starting authentication verification with 3 retries
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - === Authentication check attempt 1/3 ===
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Current URL: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Page title: Feed | LinkedIn
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Cookie authentication successful! (attempt 1, 0.00s, total 18.59s)
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - Successfully authenticated to: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - DEBUG - login_with_cookie() completed in 18.59 seconds
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Successfully logged in to LinkedIn using cookie
17:14:52 - drivers.chrome - INFO - Chrome WebDriver session created and authenticated successfully
17:14:52 - __main__ - INFO - ✅ Web driver initialized and authenticated successfully
🔗 LinkedIn MCP Server v1.3.2 🔗
========================================
✅ Authentication ready

🚀 Server ready! Choose transport mode:
[?] Choose mcp transport mode:
 > stdio (Default CLI mode)
   streamable-http (HTTP server mode)
17:15:01 - mcp.server.lowlevel.server - DEBUG - Initializing server 'linkedin_scraper'
17:15:01 - mcp.server.lowlevel.server - DEBUG - Registering handler for ListToolsRequest
17:15:01 - mcp.server.lowlevel.server - DEBUG - Registering handler for ListResourcesRequest
17:15:01 - mcp.server.lowlevel.server - DEBUG - Registering handler for ListResourceTemplatesRequest
17:15:01 - mcp.server.lowlevel.server - DEBUG - Registering handler for PromptListRequest
17:15:01 - mcp.server.lowlevel.server - DEBUG - Registering handler for CallToolRequest
17:15:01 - mcp.server.lowlevel.server - DEBUG - Registering handler for ReadResourceRequest
17:15:01 - mcp.server.lowlevel.server - DEBUG - Registering handler for GetPromptRequest
17:15:01 - asyncio - DEBUG - Using selector: KqueueSelector
[07/25/25 17:15:01] INFO     Starting MCP server 'linkedin_scraper' with transport 'stdio'               server.py:1327
17:15:01 - FastMCP.fastmcp.server.server - INFO - Starting MCP server 'linkedin_scraper' with transport 'stdio'

[stickerdaniel]

Fixed in #33