Fix for Sudden "403 Forbidden" Error (PodMe WAF blocking default User-Agent) #20
Description
Sorry guys. I never use Github, but wanted to contribute.
As of recently, running the harvest script suddenly results in a 403 Forbidden error directly from PodMe's Nginx server.
Error output:
PodMeApiError: (403, {'message': '<html>\r\n<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>\r\n<body>\r\n<center><h1>403 Forbidden</h1></center>\r\n<hr><center>nginx</center>\r\n</body>\r\n</html>\r\n'})
Root Cause
PodMe has updated their Web Application Firewall (WAF) and is now actively blocking the hardcoded User-Agent used by podme-api.
Currently, the API tries to connect using:
Podme android app/6.29.3 (Linux;Android 15) AndroidXMedia3/1.5.1
When the server sees this specific User-Agent, it instantly drops the connection.
The Workaround / Fix
To bypass the WAF, the PODME_API_USER_AGENT needs to be spoofed to a standard desktop browser.
Manual fix:
- Navigate to your virtual environment and open
site-packages/podme_api/const.py. - Locate
PODME_API_USER_AGENT. - Replace the string with a standard browser agent, for example:
PODME_API_USER_AGENT = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" - Save the file and run the script again. The downloads will start working immediately.
Automated fix for Windows/PowerShell users:
If you just want to patch your local environment quickly, you can run this in your PowerShell (make sure to update the path to match your actual environment):
$const_path = "C:\Path\To\Your\Env\venv\Lib\site-packages\podme_api\const.py"
(Get-Content $const_path) -replace '^PODME_API_USER_AGENT.*', "PODME_API_USER_AGENT = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'" | Set-Content $const_path -Encoding UTF8
I'm not a programmer, so Ai did this for me, but it worked!