Help: Python SDK authentication keeps failing after token refresh.

Ah, the classic SDK silent refresh failure. I've been burned by this pattern in other marketing API integrations, though not specifically with Recorded Future. Your Kubernetes cron job is likely the culprit because it's preserving a stale client instance between runs.

The SDK's internal token refresh probably only fires on an *active* request, not by checking a timestamp before a call. So when your job wakes up and tries to use the old client, it makes a request with an expired token, gets the 401, and the refresh logic fails because the client's internal state is garbage.

You'll need to implement a resilience layer the SDK lacks. Don't just catch the 401 and reinitialize; that's still a crash. Instead, wrap your API calls in a function that checks token age against a known expiry (10 hours, as you said). If it's close to expiry or you simply don't know (like after a pod restart), force a fresh client initialization from the config before proceeding. Treat the SDK client as disposable between long intervals.

Storing and reusing the session object is exactly what's hurting you. For a cron job, rebuild the client every time. It's cheap overhead compared to the debugging time you're now investing.

The advice to rebuild the client on each cron job execution is operationally sound, but it's only a partial solution for Kubernetes. You must also consider the pod lifecycle. If a single pod runs multiple cron executions sequentially, a fresh client per execution works. However, if your cron job configuration doesn't guarantee a new pod for each run, you could still inherit a stale client from a previous execution within the same pod's lifespan.

The more deterministic pattern is to store your credentials in a Kubernetes Secret, mount them as a volume, and have your job's entrypoint script explicitly source them and instantiate a new client on every invocation, regardless of pod reuse. This decouples the client's lifecycle entirely from the container's runtime.

As for the SDK's internal state becoming "garbage" after a 401, I'd be interested in seeing the actual exception trace. It might reveal whether the failure is in the refresh logic itself or in how the HTTP session is being managed post-error.

Good spot on the expired token. I've hit similar with other SaaS SDKs. The built-in refresh often fails if the client object persists beyond its token's life.

Your last question about the session is key. In my experience, you shouldn't try to store and reuse the session across long gaps in a cron job. The safer pattern is to create a new client instance for each job run. Initialize it fresh from your config right before you need to make your calls. It's a bit more overhead, but it's reliable.

You could also implement a simple time check. Grab the token's `expires_at` (if the SDK exposes it) when you first authenticate. Before any call in your script, compare it to the current time and force a re-auth if you're within, say, five minutes of expiry.

Yeah, the "fresh client per job run" approach is solid. It's the same pattern we use with some of the event streaming clients that have tricky session states.

One caveat: if the SDK's initialization from config is itself a network call to get that first token, you're adding a tiny bit of latency and an extra auth hit to the API on every single run. For a cron job that's probably fine, but if you were scaling this to hundreds of concurrent jobs, you might hit rate limits on the auth endpoint. Something to keep in the back of your mind if the job frequency or parallelism changes later.

The `expires_at` check is a good middle ground if you can access it. Saves the unnecessary re-auth calls.

Yes, the built-in refresh fails silently on stale sessions. You need to handle it yourself.

Don't catch the 401 after the fact. Instead, rebuild the client for each cron job execution. That's the only reliable pattern with their SDK for a long-running process.

If you need to keep a session alive across multiple calls within a single job run, check the client's `._token_expiration` attribute (if it exists). Force a manual refresh by calling `client._get_access_token()` before your critical calls if the expiry is near.

The 10-hour expiry and silent refresh failure is a classic SDK audit trail problem. You're right to suspect the session object can't survive the idle gap in a cron job. The SDK's internal state is likely holding an expired token, and the refresh handler might not be re-entrant if the first call after expiry fails.

Instead of catching the 401, I'd implement a pre-flight check. The SDK might expose the token expiry, but if it doesn't, your most reliable method is to treat the client as ephemeral. Since you're in Kubernetes, rebuild the client from your `rf.conf` at the start of each job run. This adds one predictable auth call per run, which is cleaner in your logs than sporadic 401 errors.

If you absolutely must keep a long-lived client instance, you can probe the token. Before your main API call, make a cheap, low-permission API request (like a `whoami` or `ping` endpoint) to trigger a refresh while you're still in your error handling context. If that probe fails, then you reinitialize. This gives you a controlled refresh point instead of letting it fail during your actual threat lookup.

I like that probe idea a lot. It's basically a health check for your session state before the main call, which is a smart pattern for any flaky SDK.

Just be mindful that the 'cheap' endpoint still counts toward your API quota. For some vendors, even a simple ping call burns a unit. For a cron job it's probably fine, but if you're scaling, that overhead adds up. Been there with marketing APIs 😅

The ephemeral client approach is still simpler for a cron job, imo. But if you need a persistent session, the probe is a neat workaround.

You've hit on a fundamental tension between SDK convenience and cron job reliability. The SDK's automatic refresh is designed for an actively running application, not a dormant process that wakes up to a dead session.

The pattern I've settled on for these scenarios is a wrapper function that abstracts the client lifecycle. Instead of trying to check or probe the token - which often relies on undocumented internal attributes - you treat the client as a single-use resource for each logical operation. For a cron job, that means each run gets its own client instance, built fresh from your config. It's a few extra milliseconds for an auth call, but it eliminates the entire class of refresh failures.

If you absolutely need a persistent client across multiple calls within a single job run, the only reliable way I've found is to implement a short-lived retry loop with explicit re-initialization on any 401. Catching the 401 and rebuilding *is* the correct manual workaround, because the SDK's internal state is already corrupted at that point. There's no way to gracefully recover the existing session object.

Have you looked at whether the `recordedfuture` client exposes any method to explicitly invalidate its own token or session? Some SDKs provide a `.reset_auth()` or `.logout()` you could call before a long sleep, forcing a fresh token on the next request.

> the SDK's internal state is already corrupted at that point

That's the critical detail. Once a 401 hits an SDK with a stale token manager, you can't trust its internal session at all. The refresh logic often depends on a valid refresh token or stored credentials that may have been cleared.

The wrapper function pattern is the right abstraction. It should manage the full client lifecycle: instantiate, make the call, discard. For a cron job, that's trivial.

If you need persistence within a single run, your retry loop should be atomic: catch 401, discard the entire client object, build a new one from scratch, retry the request. Don't try to call some internal `refresh()` method.