0.118.0 gets stuck on startup when `plugins/featured` returns a Cloudflare challenge page

Resolved 💬 1 comment Opened Apr 2, 2026 by xluos Closed Apr 2, 2026

What version of Codex CLI is running?

0.118.0

What subscription do you have?

plus

Which model were you using?

_No response_

What platform is your computer?

_No response_

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

_No response_

What issue are you seeing?

After upgrading from 0.117.0 to 0.118.0, Codex started getting stuck during startup on my
machine.

I rolled back to 0.117.0 first, then did some local debugging. What I found is that this seems
related to a startup request to:

https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/plugins/featured?platform=codex

From terminal / CLI context on my machine, that endpoint returns a Cloudflare challenge page
instead of JSON:

```bash
curl -I 'https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/plugins/featured?platform=codex'

Response:

HTTP/2 403
cf-mitigated: challenge
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

And the body contains:

Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue

What’s confusing is that opening the same URL in a browser works fine for me. So this does not
look like a simple “endpoint is down” issue. It seems more like browser traffic is accepted, but
terminal/CLI traffic gets challenged.

I also checked a couple of other endpoints and they look normal from terminal:

curl -I 'https://auth.openai.com/oauth/token'
curl -I 'https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/codex/responses'

Those return normal API-style responses (405 + JSON), so this doesn’t seem to be a general
connectivity problem.

Relevant log lines from ~/.codex/log/codex-tui.log:

failed to warm featured plugin ids cache error=remote plugin sync request to
https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/plugins/featured failed with status 403 Forbidden: <html>

Later I also see:

failed to load full apps list; falling back to installed apps snapshot: Failed to load apps:
Failed to parse JSON response

So my guess is:

0.118.0 is trying to load featured plugins/apps during startup
that request gets a Cloudflare challenge HTML page instead of JSON
Codex doesn’t handle that path well enough and startup ends up looking stuck / broken

A couple more notes:

MCP config exists in my setup, but from the logs it doesn’t look like MCP init is the main

blocker here

npx -y @openai/codex@0.118.0 --version works fine, so this does not look like a broken install

package

Expected behavior:
If plugins/featured is blocked / challenged / returns non-JSON, Codex should probably just skip
featured plugin loading and continue startup normally instead of appearing hung.

If needed I can provide:

exact curl outputs
more log lines
my config.toml
a quick test with features.apps=false / features.plugins=false

What steps can reproduce the bug?

codex start

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

This issue has 1 comment on GitHub. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗