rbw sync: missing field `access_token`

Today I ran into this error when trying to sync my Bitwarden vault with rbw:

$ rbw sync
rbw sync: failed to sync database from server: failed to parse JSON: missing field access_token at line 1 column 393

Diagnosis¶

This is a known rbw bug that has existed since 2020 (#32) and remains open. It happens with both official Bitwarden and Vaultwarden. It's not related to your Vaultwarden version.

Cause: rbw stores a session token locally that gets corrupted or expires. When trying to sync, the server returns a JSON response without the access_token field that rbw expects. The local rbw cache ends up in an invalid state.

Solution¶

rbw purge
rbw sync

rbw purge clears the local vault cache. Then rbw sync will ask for your master password and re-download everything from scratch.

Bug context¶

• Open since December 2020 (#32), 19 👍, no fix
• Reopened in August 2024 (#202) with the same symptoms
• The maintainer (doy) hasn't been able to reproduce it → still unfixed
• Tends to happen after adding new entries (TOTP, SSH keys) from another client (browser extension, web vault) and then trying to sync from rbw

TL;DR: rbw purge && rbw sync and you should be good.