iOS iSH ‘No results found!’

[Kvan2011]

Make sure you are on the latest version by running ani-cli -U

Metadata (please complete the following information)
Version: 5.0.3
OS: iOS iSH
Shell: /bin/busybox
Anime: all?

Describe the bug
After the initial ‘ani-cli’ command, and asking to search, no matter which anime you search for it returns ‘No results found!’

Steps To Reproduce

1. Run ani-cli
2. Search any anime

Expected behavior
Should show a list of matching shows

Screenshots

Additional context

[Lokendra2244]

same on arch linux

sudo ani-cli -U
[sudo] password for lokendra:
[branch:master] Checking for Update..
patching file /usr/bin/ani-cli
[branch:master] Updated: 5.0.2 -> 5.0.3
ani-cli --rofi
Checking dependencies...
xkbcommon: ERROR: [XKB-679] No Compose file for locale "en_IN.ISO8859-1": locale is either invalid or not installed
xkbcommon: ERROR: [XKB-679] couldn't find a Compose file for locale "en_IN" (mapped to "en_IN.ISO8859-1")
No results found!

[ofbxyua-alt]

I'm getting the same thing on WSL

Checking dependencies...
Search anime: ten
No results found!

[Ohanronnie]

same thing here!

[TBA5854]

anidb.app is down

[DavidsonRafaelK]

Some extra diagnostic data from macOS 15 (arm64, ani-cli 5.0.0 via Homebrew, also reproduced against the 5.0.3 code path).

anidb.app is not fully down — only the server-rendered HTML routes are. The JSON API is answering normally at the same moment:

$ curl_chrome136 -sS --max-time 20 -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{time_total}\n" \
    "https://anidb.app/api/frontend/anime/777/episodes"
200 0.42

$ curl_chrome136 -sS --max-time 20 -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{time_total}\n" \
    "https://anidb.app/browse?q=naruto"
000 20.00        # timed out, 0 bytes received

Route-by-route, all measured 2026-08-27 ~11:07 UTC with curl-impersonate v2.1.1 (chrome136 profile):

route	result
/api/frontend/anime/<id>/episodes	200, ~0.4-1.0s, cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC (real origin hit, valid JSON)
/cdn-cgi/trace	200
/	hang, 0 bytes
/browse?q=naruto	hang, 0 bytes (still 0 bytes at --max-time 90)
/search/suggestions?q=naruto	hang, 0 bytes
/anime/naruto-1	hang, 0 bytes

Things I ruled out on the client side: IPv4 vs IPv6, --http1.1 / --http2 / --http3, Accept-Encoding: gzip / identity, and the chrome116 / chrome136 / firefox135 / safari170 impersonation profiles. All of them hang on the HTML routes while the JSON API keeps returning 200. The TLS handshake completes fine, so the connection is established and then the response never comes.

Worth noting for anyone landing here from a search engine: without curl-impersonate the same host returns an immediate 403 Cloudflare challenge page, which is a different failure with the same user-facing message. On this machine plain system curl (8.7.1, LibreSSL/SecureTransport) got 403 on every anidb.app URL including the JSON API, while curl-impersonate got 200 on the API. So No results found! currently has two distinct causes, and installing curl-impersonate only fixes the first one.

One side note on the error message itself: the reason this outage surfaces as No results found! rather than a connection error is that the Cloudflare guard in anidb_search only matches the body string Just a moment. When the request times out the body is empty, so that check never fires and the empty result falls through to die "No results found!" at line 557. A cheap guard would be an empty-response check right after the fetch, since an empty page is never valid here:

_page="$(anidb_curl "$(printf "$search_api" "$1")" | tr '\n' ' ' | sed 's|<a href|\n<a href|g')"
[ -z "$_page" ] && die "Connection error: no response from $base_api"

That would let users tell "the site is down" apart from "no anime by that name" the next time this happens. Checking the captured value in the caller matters here — propagating curl's exit status from inside anidb_curl would not work, since it runs in a command substitution where die only exits the subshell.

[9letters]

I'm getting the same error on Arch

[DavidsonRafaelK]

I'm getting the same error on Arch

the root cause is the anidb.app is still down

[sexyqwerty]

I'm getting the same error on Arch

the root cause is the anidb.app is still down

does this happen a lot?

[port19x]

I'm getting the same error on Arch

the root cause is the anidb.app is still down

does this happen a lot?

semi frequently sadly.
iirc coolansx was setting up an uptime tracker for it to get more percise stats on it.
I understand the frustration for sure

[71zenith]

I'm getting the same error on Arch

the root cause is the anidb.app is still down

does this happen a lot?

semi frequently sadly. iirc coolansx was setting up an uptime tracker for it to get more percise stats on it. I understand the frustration for sure

https://stats.coolans.dev/endpoints/website_anidb-app

Site has been going down a lot lately and it has gotten slow to fetch as well. We might need to look into an alternative again.