feathers: Intermittent NotAuthenticated: No auth token

@jamesholcomb. Thanks, that works for me as well. Looked up the documentation and it makes sense, kind off. If it’s optional though as the documentation says it is, this should be considered a bug.

Try adding provider: undefined to your populate schema hook argument. That fixed my particular issue.

Thank you. I followed your advice and https://docs.feathersjs.com/api/express.html#custom-service-middleware and it is now working correctly. I created a custom service with a dummy class so that I can get a place for the hook to get the data I need then added a middleware that runs after the service. What I was trying before was to get the data into the middleware function directly. May be that is not possible? Sorry for posting all this code here but I searched for a long time and couldn’t find a solution so I thought may be this solution may help somebody in the future/ Thanks again.

//dummy class for 'custom' download service
class Service {
  constructor (options) {
    this.options = options || {};
  }
  get (id, params) { 
    return Promise.resolve({id});
  }
}

module.exports = function (options) {
  return new Service(options);
};
module.exports.Service = Service;

//hooks for download service 
const { authenticate } = require('feathers-authentication').hooks;
module.exports = {
  before: {
    all: [ authenticate('jwt') ]
  },
  after: {
    get: [
      function getdownloadfileinfo (hook) {
        return hook.app.service('uploads').get(hook.result.id).then(fileinfo=> {
          hook.result = fileinfo;
          return hook;
        });
      }  
    ]
  }

// Initializes the `download` service on path `/download
const createService = require('./download.class.js');
const hooks = require('./download.hooks');
const filters = require('./download.filters');
var path = require('path');
var fs = require('fs');

module.exports = function () {
  const app = this;
  const options = {
    name: 'download',
  };
  const filestore = app.get('filestore');
  app.use('/download', 
    createService(options),
    function(req,res) {   // middleware function here <--
      const a = res.data;
      const fileondisk = path.join(filestore,'' + a._id);
      if(!fs.existsSync(fileondisk)) {
        res.status(404).end();
      } else {
        //console.log('file is there!!!\n\n');
        res.sendFile( fileondisk,
          {
            headers: {
              'Content-Type' : a.mimetype,
              'Content-Disposition' : 'attachment; filename="' + a.filename + '"',
              'Content-Length' : a.filesize
            }
          },function(err){
            if(err) console.log(err);
          }
        );
      }
    }
  );
  const service = app.service('download');
  service.hooks(hooks);
  if (service.filter) {
    service.filter(filters);
  }
};

After upgrading client and server to Buzzard, I am seeing this behavior as well for populate.

For some reason, { provider: ‘socketio’ } is coming in on options.schema even though this particular populate originated out-of-band from an RxJs subscription that processes messages on a queue. Error is ‘No auth token’

Same issue if I initiate the flow via REST.

based on the feathers chat chatwithupload upload works. when you try to download it gives authentication error. stop node and run node and download works.