PSA: Hangouts is deprecated and no longer works in bitlbee

If you’re still using Google Hangouts, no you’re not

About a week ago I ran into a weird issue in bitlbee, which I raised in their IRC channel:

<bertieb> Hey, I had a quick search but can't be sure whether the issue is my instance or google deprecation- is hangouts still functional?
<bertieb> for context: since yesterday evening I could receieve messages but not send them; and doing an acc hangouts off/on logs me in but gives me no contacts, similar to issue #235 in purple-hangouts
<bertieb> I checked the debug logs and I am seeing 403 response for some requests
<bertieb> the weird thing is I am still getting messages delivered to me via bitlbee (had one just there!) even though the friend account is offline

So I could receive messages but not send them. When I logged out of hangouts and back in (in bitlbee, acc hangouts off, then acc hangouts on) my contacts disappeared.

There had been news of Google shutting down hangouts for a while, and it seems like they went ahead on November 1st. It seems that since then, they’ve slowly been disabling API endpoints. Today I checked the debug logs again and saw:

bitlbee    | DEBUG http: Performing new request 0x563b5ec64400 to clients6.google.com.
bitlbee    | DEBUG http: Request 0x563b5ec64400 performed without success.
bitlbee    | DEBUG hangouts: Error from server: (Invalid HTTP response code (403)) {
bitlbee    |   "error": {          
bitlbee    |     "code": 403,
bitlbee    |     "message": "Hangouts Classic private API has not been used in project 1021803392181 before or it is disabled. Enable it by visiting https://console.developer
s.google.com/apis/api/chat-pa.googleapis.com/overview?project=1021803392181 then retry. If you enabled this API recently, wait a few minutes for the action to propagate to ou
r systems and retry.",             
bitlbee    |     "errors": [
bitlbee    |       {            
bitlbee    |         "message": "Hangouts Classic private API has not been used in project 1021803392181 before or it is disabled. Enable it by visiting https://console.devel
opers.google.com/apis/api/chat-pa.googleapis.com/overview?project=1021803392181 then retry. If you enabled this API recently, wait a few minutes for the action to propagate t
o our systems and retry.",                                                                                                                                                    
bitlbee    |         "domain": "usageLimits",
bitlbee    |         "reason": "accessNotConfigured",
bitlbee    |         "extendedHelp": "https://console.developers.google.com"
bitlbee    |       }                                                                   
bitlbee    |     ],            
bitlbee    |     "status": "PERMISSION_DENIED",    
bitlbee    |     "details": [                                                          
bitlbee    |       {               
bitlbee    |         "@type": "type.googleapis.com/google.rpc.Help",
bitlbee    |         "links": [                                                        
bitlbee    |           {                
bitlbee    |             "description": "Google developers console API activation",
bitlbee    |             "url": "https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/chat-pa.googleapis.com/overview?project=1021803392181"
bitlbee    |           }        
bitlbee    |         ]
bitlbee    |       },
bitlbee    |       {
bitlbee    |         "@type": "type.googleapis.com/google.rpc.ErrorInfo",
bitlbee    |         "reason": "SERVICE_DISABLED",
bitlbee    |         "domain": "googleapis.com",
bitlbee    |         "metadata": {
bitlbee    |           "consumer": "projects/1021803392181",
bitlbee    |           "service": "chat-pa.googleapis.com"
bitlbee    |         }
bitlbee    |       }
bitlbee    |     ]
bitlbee    |   }
bitlbee    | }

Replacement for Hangouts

Enter purple-googlechat! The prolific EionRobb has a plugin for GChat, like he’s made for many other networks.

I replaced the hangouts plugin with purple-googlechat in the Docker image I use (which I have mentioned before), recompiled and logged in (see video below for the auth cookie retrieval method). A couple of notes:

• for some reason, the cookie didn’t show up in Chromium; but it worked in Firefox
• my contacts appeared as numbers (see below, or this GH issue) prefixed with an underscore, and no setting of nick_format would change that, so I manually /rename-ed them in bitlbee