[Bug]: API intermittently fails to open budget with automated transaction imports

[spenco100]

Verified issue does not already exist?

• I have searched and found no existing issue

Is this related to GoCardless, Simplefin or another bank-sync provider?

• I have checked my server logs and could not see any errors there
• I will be attaching my server logs to this issue
• I will be attaching my client-side (browser) logs to this issue
• I understand that this issue will be automatically closed if insufficient information is provided

What happened?

I have a system where all my cards / bank accounts send transaction alerts to a single mailbox, and a server to monitor that mailbox. I parse details from the emails, add the transactions to a google sheet, and then to my new Actual server (hosted on Fly.io)

Intermittently I see transactions that appear in my Google sheet but not in Actual - and my error logging shows the following error coinciding with the times that transactions were processed in my server.

Server running imports with the Actual API logs show:
Error: We had an unknown problem opening “My-Finances-7172b03”.

Has anyone else had this issue? Is there a better method I am not seeing in the docs, to import transactions? Here is my server config and code.

Node version: 18.12.0
Actual API version (running on my 3rd party server):
"@actual-app/api": "^6.4.0"

Actual server version:
"@actual-app/crdt": "2.1.0"
"@actual-app/web": "24.1.0"

Function calling the Actual API from my server:

const api = require('@actual-app/api');
// Write 1+ transaction to the Actual server
async function writeTransactions(transactions) {
    let result = { error: null, response: null };
    try {
        const actualTransactions = transactions.map(convertTransaction);

        await api.init({
            serverURL: host,
            password: password,
        });

        // load the budget
        await api.downloadBudget(actual_sync_id);

        // sort transactions by card into a larger object
        const transactionsByCard = {};
        actualTransactions.forEach(transaction => {
            const { account } = transaction;
            if (!transactionsByCard[account]) transactionsByCard[account] = [];
            transactionsByCard[account].push(transaction);
        });

        Object.keys(transactionsByCard).forEach(account => {
            api.importTransactions(account, transactionsByCard[account]);
        });

    } catch (e) {
        console.error(e);
        result.error = (typeof e != "string") ? JSON.stringify(e) : e;
    } finally {
        await api.shutdown();
        return result;
    }
};

What error did you receive?

Exception from a finished function: Error: We had an unknown problem opening “My-Finances-7172b03”.

Where are you hosting Actual?

Fly.io

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

No response

Operating System

Linux

[youngcw]

The api can be really finicky about node versions. Im on 18.19 and it works fine.

[youngcw]

Closing for now unless something else comes up. If you are still having issues I recommend trying a few node versions and see what works.