Troubleshooting

Most of these come down to network reality or how Walmart serves its data, not a bug. Each case maps to an exit code so a script can tell them apart.

A command exits 4

The product, search, category, and store surfaces sit behind Walmart's bot manager, which walls them from datacenter IPs. From a home network they usually answer; from a datacenter or a cloud host they hit the wall, and walmart reports need-auth (exit 4) rather than pretending the result was empty. Two remedies, and the error message names both: run from a residential network, or opt in to the Affiliate API by setting WALMART_CONSUMER_ID and a private key so the commands fall back to it. store find and trending have no anonymous endpoint and need the credentials regardless of network. See configuration.

The suggest and category tree surfaces are not affected; they read from any network.

Requests start failing or returning 429

Walmart rate-limits like any public site. walmart already paces requests and retries the transient failures, but a hard limit still means backing off, and it reports rate-limited (exit 5). Raise the delay between requests with --rate (for example --rate 1s) and retry later. A burst of 429 or 5xx responses is the site asking you to slow down, not a defect.

A reference is not found

An unknown id, a removed product, or a reference walmart cannot classify reports not-found (exit 6). Check that the id is spelled the way Walmart uses it, and that the product still exists in a private browser window before assuming it is gone.

Prices come back without a currency you expected

Walmart serves US pages in USD, but the price and its currency are read together, so each record carries an explicit currency field alongside the number. Read the two together rather than assuming a currency.

The binary is not on your PATH

go install puts the binary in $(go env GOPATH)/bin (usually ~/go/bin), and a release archive leaves it wherever you unpacked it. If your shell cannot find walmart, add that directory to your PATH. See installation.

Seeing what walmart actually did

When something behaves unexpectedly, -v adds per-request detail so you can see the URLs it hit and the responses it got. That is usually enough to tell a bot wall apart from a rate limit apart from a genuinely empty result. Add --no-cache to force a fresh fetch when you suspect a stale cached page.