CLI always log warning Failed to init ClientTransaction

[yjl9903]

Version

0.8.6

Operating System

macOS

Browser (for cookie extraction)

Edge

Access Method

Local terminal

What happened?

CLI always log warning, and it will break json output:

WARNING twitter_cli.client: Failed to init ClientTransaction: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'

Expected behavior

Fix the issue or change this warning to debug

Steps to reproduce

$ twitter search 'xxx' -t Latest --max 30 --json
WARNING twitter_cli.client: Failed to init ClientTransaction: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'
{
  "ok": true,
  "schema_version": "1",
  "data": []
}



$ twitter -v search 'xxx' -t Latest --max 30 --json
DEBUG twitter_cli.auth: Attempting browser cookie extraction
DEBUG twitter_cli.auth: arc in-process extraction failed: Failed to find cookies for Arc browser
INFO twitter_cli.auth: Extracted 12 total cookies for full browser fingerprint
INFO twitter_cli.auth: Found cookies in chrome profile 'Default' (in-process)
INFO twitter_cli.client: curl_cffi impersonating chrome133a
DEBUG twitter_cli.auth: Verifying Twitter cookies with full forwarded cookie header
DEBUG twitter_cli.auth: Verification endpoint https://api.x.com/1.1/account/verify_credentials.json returned HTTP 404, trying next...
DEBUG twitter_cli.auth: Verification endpoint https://x.com/i/api/1.1/account/settings.json returned HTTP 404, trying next...
INFO twitter_cli.auth: Cookie verification skipped (attempts: verify_credentials.json=404, settings.json=404), will verify on first API call
WARNING twitter_cli.client: Failed to init ClientTransaction: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'
DEBUG twitter_cli.client: Timeline page returned no tweets but exposed next cursor; continuing pagination
DEBUG twitter_cli.client: Sleeping 1.8s between requests
{
  "ok": true,
  "schema_version": "1",
  "data": []
}

Diagnostics

Error output / logs

[Amirezamky9]

Root cause & fix

This warning isn't just cosmetic — it breaks twitter search entirely (returns 404 on SearchTimeline).

Root cause

In _ensure_client_transaction(), the code fetches https://x.com (the logged-out landing page):

home_page = cffi_session.get(
    "https://x.com", headers=ct_headers, timeout=10,
)

Twitter removed the ondemand.s.*.js reference from the logged-out page in mid-2026. The get_ondemand_file_url() function (from xclienttransaction) calls:

ON_DEMAND_FILE_REGEX.search(str(response)).group(1)

Since the pattern no longer exists on x.com, .search() returns None, and .group(1) raises AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'.

Without a valid ClientTransaction, the x-client-transaction-id header is missing, and the SearchTimeline GraphQL endpoint returns HTTP 404.

Why other endpoints work

• twitter feed / twitter user-posts — these don't require x-client-transaction-id
• twitter search — always broken, silent 404

Fix (one line)

Fetch the authenticated timeline page instead:

- "https://x.com"
+ "https://x.com/home"

Applied at twitter_cli/client.py line ~1074.

The /home endpoint still contains:

• The ondemand.s.*.js pattern (59924:"ondemand.s")
• The loading-x-anim SVG elements required for animation-key generation
• The twitter-site-verification meta tag

Why this matters

Without this fix, twitter search returns 404 on every query (confirmed on twitter-cli 0.8.5 + xclienttransaction 1.0.3). The warning is not harmless — it silently breaks all search functionality.