We are building a custom chat interface for our support portal and decided to bypass the standard Genesys Cloud Messenger widget to have full control over the UI/UX. The goal is to use the WebSocket-based Guest API directly. We have a backend service that handles the OAuth client credentials flow to get an access token, which we then pass to the frontend.
The issue occurs during the initial authentication handshake on the WebSocket connection. According to the documentation, after establishing the connection to wss://api.mypurecloud.com/api/v2/conversations/guest/websocket, we need to send an auth message with the access token. Here is the payload we are sending:
{
"type": "auth",
"token": "eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9..."
}
Immediately after sending this, the server responds with a 401 error in the WebSocket message, rather than an authAccepted message. The error body is minimal:
{
"type": "error",
"code": 401,
"message": "Unauthorized"
}
I have verified that the token is valid by using it in a standard REST call to /api/v2/me, which returns 200 OK. The token also has the conversations:read and conversations:write scopes. I am using the ws library in Node.js for the backend proxy, but the same issue happens when testing directly from the browser using the native WebSocket API.
Is there a specific claim or scope required on the token for the Guest API WebSocket that isn’t documented? Or is the auth message structure different from what I have here? We need to instrument this flow in New Relic to track the latency of the handshake, but we can’t proceed if the connection drops immediately. Any code examples of a successful auth handshake would be appreciated.