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weibo

Troubleshooting

The things that trip people up, and how to fix each one.

Most issues come down to network reality, Weibo's access controls, or a session cookie that has expired — not a bug.

Exit 4: surface requires a login

user and posts return this when no session cookie is set or when the cookie is expired.

# Set the cookie
export WEIBO_COOKIE='SUB=xxx; SUBP=yyy'
weibo user 2656274875

How to get a fresh cookie:

  1. Open weibo.com in Chrome and log in.
  2. Press F12, go to Application → Cookies → weibo.com.
  3. Copy the SUB and SUBP values.
  4. Set WEIBO_COOKIE='SUB=<value>; SUBP=<value>' in your shell.

Note: the visitor token flow (genvisitor2) returns a sub/subp pair but it requires a JS-driven cross-domain activation step that cannot be replicated in pure HTTP without a browser. There is no workaround — a real logged-in session is the only option for these surfaces.

Requests failing or returning 429

Weibo rate-limits like any public site. weibo already paces requests and retries transient failures, but a hard limit still means backing off.

Raise the delay between requests:

weibo posts 2656274875 --rate 2s

Lower any parallelism in scripts that call weibo in a loop, and retry later. A burst of 429 or 5xx responses is the site asking you to slow down, not a defect.

Nothing found for something you expected

The public surface is not the whole site. Some data requires JavaScript rendering, regional access, or a logged-in session, and that part is not reachable without the right setup. Check that the id is correct, verify that the content is visible in a private browser window, and confirm you are not hitting a rate limit.

The binary is not on your PATH

go install puts the binary in $(go env GOPATH)/bin (usually ~/go/bin), and a release archive leaves it wherever you unpacked it. If your shell cannot find weibo, add that directory to your PATH. See installation.

Seeing what weibo actually sent

Pass -q=false to keep progress output even in a script, or run with --quiet=false to confirm which endpoints are being called. There is no -v verbose flag; the progress lines on stderr are the visibility mechanism.

2 min read