Web Service Access Control Exception

If you are creating or using a web service in Moodle and see the following message:

{
    "exception": "webservice_access_exception",
    "errorcode": "accessexception",
    "message": "Access control exception"
}

It can be a bit hard to troubleshoot. Generally there is a 4th item with debugging info, but this will only appear if you have the correct Moodle debugging level set:

At minimum you’ll need to set debug level to NORMAL: Show errors, warnings and notices. That is, it won’t apear if you have it set to NONE or MINIMAL.

Once you do that you should get that 4th parameter:

{
    "exception": "webservice_access_exception",
    "errorcode": "accessexception",
    "message": "Access control exception",
    "debuginfo": "You are not allowed to use the {$a} protocol (missing capability: webservice/rest:use)"
}

In this example, the user that is associated with the web service token didn’t have the capability webservice/rest:use in their system role. Adding the capability to the role fixed the issue.