# API connections with IPv6

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/api-connections-with-ipv6/285921>\
**Category:** Development\
**Tags:** rest-api\
**Created:** [November 18, 2023, 10:22am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/api-connections-with-ipv6/285921 "2023-11-18T10:22:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![hrishikeshk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@hrishikeshk](https://meta.discourse.org/u/hrishikeshk)\
**Post date:** [November 18, 2023, 10:22am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/api-connections-with-ipv6/285921/1 "2023-11-18T10:22:24Z")

</div>

Follow-up of: [API connection via ipv6 vs. ipv4 - support - Discourse Meta](https://meta.discourse.org/t/155024)

I recently upgraded Node.js from 18 to 20 and my application suddenly stopped getting API response back from Discourse. It took me a while to figure out it was related to the above issue. I verified this by making a connection only over IPv4 like:

```ts
import {Agent} from 'node:https'
import axios from 'axios'
import {env} from 'node:process'
export const axiosDiscourse = axios.create({
  baseURL: 'https://<discourse-url>',
  headers: {
    'api-key': env['DISCOURSE_KEY'],
    'api-username': env['DISCOURSE_USERNAME']
  },
  httpsAgent: new Agent({
    family: 4
  })
})

```

the important part being specifying the HTTP Agent - I was using it without that before. This now works, but I was in an attempt to migrate off Axios, so I can use other fetch-based libraries like Wretch (primarly to reduce the bundle size by using that in the frontend as well): [elbywan/wretch: A tiny wrapper built around fetch with an intuitive syntax. 🍬 (github.com)](https://github.com/elbywan/wretch). However, there’s no option to specify the IPv4 or IPv6 with fetch. Thus, I figured I need to either:

1. Force using IPv4 only somehow and in spite of all my attempts so far, this has not been possible
2. Check with Discourse on how I could get this working on IPv6.

I am connecting to various other APIs from my application, none have this issue, it’s only the connection with Discourse that’s failing.

This is the error I’m getting in case it helps:

```plaintext
Error: connect ETIMEDOUT 184.105.99.43:443
    at createConnectionError (node:net:1634:14)
    at Timeout.internalConnectMultipleTimeout (node:net:1685:38)
    at listOnTimeout (node:internal/timers:575:11)
    at processTimers (node:internal/timers:514:7) {
  errno: -110,
  code: 'ETIMEDOUT',
  syscall: 'connect',
  address: '184.105.99.43',
  port: 443
},
Error: connect ENETUNREACH 2602:fd3f:3:ff01::2b:443 - Local (:::0)
    at internalConnectMultiple (node:net:1176:40)
    at Timeout.internalConnectMultipleTimeout (node:net:1687:3)
    at listOnTimeout (node:internal/timers:575:11)
    at processTimers (node:internal/timers:514:7) {
  errno: -101,
  code: 'ENETUNREACH',
  syscall: 'connect',
  address: '2602:fd3f:3:ff01::2b',
  port: 443
}

```

What’s interesting is, unlike the above mentioned thread, I don’t get response after long. My request immediately fails with this error. The API call works fine in the browser, curl and anything else I can test.

My way of making a request to the API doesn’t matter as long as I’m making a request from my application. It simply fails and works only by using the family option as mentioned above. In the linked thread, I see this being mentioned:’

> You’ll need to investigate why IPv6 connections don’t work on your network.

I have 2 concerns with that:

1. I don’t know how to specifically check that.
2. Not sure why this would be a problem only with Discourse, and only with my application.

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/api-connections-with-ipv6/285921)._