Issue Cloudflare DNS Extension Fails with JsonException when Cloudflare returns non-JSON errors (502/524)

X3Web · 2026-03-13T01:07:31-0700

Hi everyone,

We are experiencing a failure with the “DNS Integration for Cloudflare” extension on Plesk Obsidian 18.0.76.

The extension appears to assume that all Cloudflare API responses are valid JSON. However Cloudflare occasionally returns plain text or HTML responses (for example 524, 502 Bad Gateway, or error text), which causes the extension to crash.

Environment

Code:

Plesk Obsidian 18.0.76.2
Ubuntu 20.04
Extension: cloudflaredns

Error observed in panel.log

Code:

Task failed: type=ext-cloudflaredns-task\importdnsfordomainnamelisttask
JsonException: Syntax error
file: /opt/psa/admin/plib/modules/cloudflaredns/library/CloudflareApi/HttpServiceApi.php
line: 54

Trace shows the extension trying to decode a non-JSON response:

Code:

json_decode('<html>
<head><title>502 Bad Gateway</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>502 Bad Gateway</h1></center>

or

json_decode('error code: 524')

The extension then throws:

JsonException: Syntax error

instead of handling the response gracefully.

Additional error seen

Cloudflare: 403 Forbidden. Invalid access token.

But this error is not handled cleanly because the extension crashes first when parsing upstream responses.

Root cause

The Cloudflare extension assumes:

$responseBody = json_decode(...)

but Cloudflare sometimes returns:

HTML error pages
plain text error codes
timeout messages

These responses are not JSON, so json_decode() throws JsonException.

Suggested fix

The extension should:

Check the response Content-Type
Attempt JSON decoding safely
Fall back to raw text parsing if response is not JSON
Avoid throwing JsonException for upstream errors

Pseudo-fix example:

Code:

$body = (string)$response->getBody();

try {
$data = json_decode($body, true, 512, JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR);
} catch (\JsonException $e) {
return "Cloudflare API error: " . trim(strip_tags($body));
}

Why this matters

Currently this causes the entire extension to become unusable, including:

importing DNS zones
exporting DNS zones
listing Cloudflare zones

The UI cannot recover because the exception happens in the API wrapper.

Question

Has anyone encountered this issue or is there a planned update to the Cloudflare extension to handle non-JSON API responses?

Thanks!

Issue Cloudflare DNS Extension Fails with JsonException when Cloudflare returns non-JSON errors (502/524)

X3Web

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