Bitwarden clients troubleshooting

General

If you encounter any issue with any official Bitwarden client, trying to report an issue at any of the Bitwarden repo's will probably result in a closed issue stating they do not support alternative server's, and they are right to do so.

However, sometimes the issue really is a client side issue and isn't something which can be fixed on the server side, and thus not by Vaultwarden it self. To prevent tossing around users between Vaultwarden and Bitwarden it's best to follow a few steps to determine where the issue is located and help solve this for both projects. These steps might seem cumbersome, but keep in mind that someone has to take to steps to see where the issue is, and the best person to test those out, is the person who found it in the first place.

Also, be sure to test out the :testing tagged images of Vaultwarden before you report an issue regarding any client, this includes the web-vault. As the :testing tagged images might already contain fixes for newer client, but we have not yet deemed to release a stable yet.

I do suggest to create a backup of your database before running the :testing tagged images, as it might update or migrate some data, which isn't backwards compatible with an older server version!

How to troubleshoot an issue

The best thing to do is, create a free Bitwarden Cloud account and try to reproduce the same steps using their online cloud service. If you can reproduce it via the Bitwarden Cloud environment, report this issue at Bitwarden and state you were using their online cloud service.

Now, if this for some reason isn't reproducible on the Bitwarden Cloud, it might still be a client issue, but then linked to a Self-Hosted system, which Bitwarden also offers, but that is a bit harder to test for most users, and probably not recommended for most people to try this out.

When unable to reproduce, what to do next?

If you are not able to reproduce this with Bitwarden Cloud, and the Vaultwarden :testing tagged image also didn't worked out, then you might be in a limbo here on where to report this.

To not create a flood of issues, it is better to start a Discussion first, and once determined it might be a Vaultwarden issue, we can either convert the discussion to an issue, or might ask to create a new issue with all the needed steps and details to reproduce this. This helps both users and developers.

Tips and Tricks to test clients

Might be useful to add some tips and tricks here on how to troubleshoot some clients.

We already have an Android Client page, other clients might follow.

Also, recent Bitwarden Mobile clients have a feature called Flight Recording, which is to help troubleshoot issues. This is also beneficial for Vaultwarden, as it might help show what the client was expecting, but didn't received.

To read more about this feature, look at the Bitwarden documentation here: https://bitwarden.com/help/flight-recorder/