Failing to open websocket client connection on both wasm and native builds

Question

I am building out my first Rust client/server application and struggling to get my client/server talking to each other over a websocket connection.

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Problem Overview

• I am using axum with axum-login on the server.
• I am using reqwest and ewebsock on the clients.
• I am using websockets to transport data between the server and connected clients.
• The client code needs to build and run on wasm and native targets.
• Everything works perfectly with the wasm client.
• The native client fails when opening the websocket conneciton with a 401 Unauthorized.

Connection process

The first three steps are exactly the same for wasm and native.

Wasm client (works)

• Client send HTTP POST request to http://localhost:8080/login with login credentials
• Login succeeds.
• Client opens websocket connection via ws://localhost:8080/websocket using ewebsock crate.
• Connection opens successfully.

Native client (fails)

• Client send HTTP POST request to http://localhost:8080/login with login credentials
• Login succeeds.
• Client opens websocket connection via ws://localhost:8080/websocket using ewebsock crate.
• Connection rejected with a 401 Unauthorized response.

I can not understand why the 401 is happening only for the native client. I suspect an issue with storing the users authentication cookie but as far as I can tell, ewebsock (which depends on tokio-tungstenite) does not read the browser cookies while opening the websocket connection anyways (?).

Maybe someone who has a working user auth system with an axum web server using websockets as the transport layer could shed some light on how they got things working?

Relevant dependencies

Client

• reqwest to make http calls to backend to authorize the user.
  • enabled cookie_store on native
• ewebsock to establish a websocket connection once the user has authenticated.

Server

• axum (with feature [“ws”])
• axum-login for authentication.

Code

Servers main function - axum::Router (paired down):

let app = Router::new()
        .route("/websocket", get(websocket_handler))
        .route_layer(RequireAuthorizationLayer::<UserId, User, UserRole>::login())
        .route("/login", post(login_handler))
        .layer(TimeoutLayer::new(Duration::from_secs(4)))
        .layer(auth_layer)
        .layer(session_layer)
        .layer(CorsLayer::permissive())
        .layer(LiveReloadLayer::new())
        .with_state(app_state);

pub async fn websocket_handler(
    ws: WebSocketUpgrade,
    State(app_state): State<AppState>,
) -> impl IntoResponse {
    ws.on_upgrade(|socket| websocket(socket, app_state.websocket_state))
}

How can I fix the 401 Unauthorized response on native?

Other notes

• If I remove the requirement for authorization, both the wasm and native clients connect successfully.
• I am using axum_sessions for session management (removed this code from the snippet above).
• I still strongly suspect the issue is with cookie management - but I am not sure how to open this connection elegantly (i.e. using the same code paths) for both wasm and native.

I have tried enabling the tls feature on ewebsock crate and changing the connection url to wss://localhost/websocket. This fails.

I have tried enabling the cookie_store in reqwest - but this has no effect. I do not beleive there is a way for ewebsock to access that information anyways.