Stuck in Chapter 2 - Facebook error while loading my app

Hi,

I’m stuck in Chapter 2. No matter what I do, Facebook loads my app and shows their catch-all error message: “Error while loading page from MY APP NAME”.

I even started a new app and walked carefully through everything step by step, to the same dead end.

So here’s my setup: I created a facebook karate poke app with a unique canvas page name and pointed the callback url to my unique tunnlr url. I created a local rails app, installed the facebooker plugin and the other tunnlr gems. I command line configured the tunnlr setup for the app, and the settings are viewable in the tunnlr.yml. I also filled in facebooker.yml with my api_key, secret_key, canvas_page_name, and callback_url.

I’m able to start a tunnel with the rake tunnlr:start command (the facebooker tunnel command doesn’t work for me for some crazy reason – my ssh is installed properly, it works for the tunnlr:start rake task, so I don’t know what’s going on). I can view my app at the tunnlr url, and I can change things locally and see the results. When I add the ensure_application_is_installed_by_facebook_user to application.rb, the tunnlr url takes me to Facebook where I’m prompted to install the app.

I do install the app successfully, but the next screen is the dreaded “Error while loading page” facebook message. No matter what I do, I can’t get that screen to go away. I should be seeing a simple greeting text like I do at my tunnlr url. I even tried changing the app to use iframe instead of fbml, but there’s no change.

I’m honestly at my wits end. Anyone run into this?

Also, if you happen to read this Mike, I’m having a problem with tunnel timeout. If I let the tunnel sit idle for 10 minutes, it no longer loads through my tunnlr url. I have to shut down the tunnel in my local console and reconnect. That not’s normal is it?

Thanks for reading,

-Jon

this is really embarrassing. Why is it that you always figure the error out right after you post it online for help? I forgot to add a trailing slash to my tunnlr callback url. That’s it, that’s all. Oh my. Haha.

upon further testing I found that you don’t have to have the trailing slash, just make sure you don’t have any spaces after the url. The space is what causes the error. You’d think they’d trim that.

I also had the same problem. And I’m sure I was careful about not leaving a trailing space…

FYI, the error I was getting from my Mongrel was:
HTTP parse error, malformed request

And the clue (which I missed as well) was this:
REQUEST DATA: “POST / ?_fb_fromhash=etc…

The space between the slash and the question mark.

Ouch, that is really painful to debug. I’ll see if there is time to include a comment about spaces in the callback URL. I have a post-it on my monitor asking if I checked for a slash at the end of my URL, since that bites me all the time.