🐛 SSH Cert creation "invalid character 'u' looking for beginning of value" when expired

[bjornfro]

Sometimes, I believe when the JWT has expired you get this error message when trying to generate a SSH short lived certificate:

cloudflared access ssh-gen --hostname XYZ invalid character 'u' looking for beginning of value

Which means no SSH cert is created. Happens on both Linux and Mac. Tested with version 2024.6.0.

Doing an "rm .cloudflared/*" solves the issue.

The JWT has this content:

more .cloudflared/xyz.cloudflareaccess.com-org-token not-available

[maxnrb]

Same issue on my side

[itsvyle]

Same issue for me - deleting .cloudflared worked

[itzoey]

Just ran into this bug again on the latest cloudflared (2025.4.0). Deleting ~/.cloudflared fixed it, but this shouldn't have required human intervention.