The checkout action fails to load on github hosted runners failing builds randomly

[vvilhonen]

We're using the matrix feature with 10 concurrent jobs if that's of any relevance

[slaymance]

We ran into a similar issue following another failure during the actual checkout job. Here's some information about our incidents:

First failure

- Run actions/checkout@v2
Syncing repository: OUR_REPO
- Getting Git version info
Deleting the contents of '/home/runner/work/OUR_REPO'
- Initializing the repository
- Disabling automatic garbage collection
- Setting up auth
- Fetching the repository
- Removing auth
Error: The process '/usr/bin/git' failed with exit code 128

Second Failure

Download action repository 'actions/checkout@v2' (SHA:ec3...)
Warning: Failed to download action 'https://api.github.com/repos/actions/checkout/tarball/ec3...'. Error: The request was canceled due to the configured HttpClient.Timeout of 100 seconds elapsing.
Warning: Back off 23.444 seconds before retry.
Warning: Failed to download action 'https://api.github.com/repos/actions/checkout/tarball/ec3...'. Error: The request was canceled due to the configured HttpClient.Timeout of 100 seconds elapsing.
Warning: Back off 21.926 seconds before retry.
Error: The request was canceled due to the configured HttpClient.Timeout of 100 seconds elapsing.

And our checkout step:

- name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          persist-credentials: false

Subsequent actions have been successful since these failures around 8:00AM UTC. We're going to attempt updating to actions/checkout@v3 (released 2 days ago) and continue monitoring.

[DAGRSAG]

Hi @slaymance: Because we have the same issue as you have described in the first issue, solved updating to version 3 that problem?

BR Daniel

[dataviruset]

In case anyone else has a similar issue: we got this problem, but only on macOS GitHub hosted runners.

When running actions/checkout@v3 after the other steps, it would get stuck there and time out after the default timeout which is 6 hours.

2022-08-23T10:14:32.9098260Z ##[group]Fetching the repository
2022-08-23T10:14:32.9112470Z [command]/usr/local/bin/git -c protocol.version=2 fetch --no-tags --prune --progress --no-recurse-submodules --depth=1 origin +2dfd3ef1c71cac819fc022fae3263870f32de0d8:refs/tags/v0.1.2
2022-08-23T16:14:23.8258730Z ##[error]The operation was canceled.

Here is the code that was causing problems:

      - name: Setup Go
        uses: actions/setup-go@v2
        with:
          go-version: "1.18.x"
      - name: Configure GitHub For Private Modules
        env:
          GOPRIVATE: "github.com/aukilabs/*"
        run: git config --global url."https://redacted:${{ secrets.GITHUB_PAT }}@github.com".insteadOf "https://github.com"
      - name: Check out code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

We solved the problem by doing the actions/checkout@v3 step first.

[gulducat]

I encountered this issue too this week. Mine was apparently due to variation in how some git clients handle user:password@ (vs a single token@) in the URL?

This worked fine on everything except macos:

    steps:
      - name: Configure Git
        run: git config --global url.'https://${{ secrets.SPECIAL_TOKEN }}:@github.com'.insteadOf 'https://github.com'
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

Only the git client that actions/checkout uses on github-hosted macos runners (or some library or such) had an issue with the : in there right next to @github, but after removing the unnecessary colon, it works properly on all OSes (and golang toolchain still too).

                                           # no ":" here  ---V  makes it happy
git config --global url.'https://${{ secrets.SPECIAL_TOKEN }}@github.com'.insteadOf 'https://github.com'

So it wasn't that git config can't be run before using actions/checkout@v3, but rather that the git client on macos is a lot more finnicky with a malformed token: with trailing colon but no password in the URL, which just happened to be caused by a preceding git config step.

full workflow example that I tested with

This version works -- swap out the commented run: lines to reproduce the error.

name: macos-test
on:
  push:
    branches: [macos-hanging-checkout]

env:
  ACTIONS_RUNNER_DEBUG: true
  ACTIONS_STEP_DEBUG: true

jobs:
  macos-test:
    timeout-minutes: 5 # prevent it hanging ~indefinitely
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        os: [ubuntu-22.04, macos-11]
        do-conf: [true, false]
    runs-on: ${{matrix.os}}
    steps:
      - name: Configure Git
        # HEY!  THERE WAS A ":" IN THERE
        #run: git config --global url.'https://${{ github.token }}:@github.com'.insteadOf 'https://github.com'
        run: git config --global url.'https://${{ github.token }}@github.com'.insteadOf 'https://github.com'
        if: ${{matrix.do-conf}}
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

[joecotton-wk]

Encountered a problem very similar to @gulducat's, and the resolution was essentially the same. I had git config --global url."https://${{ secrets.GH_USER }}:${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}@github.com".insteadOf "https://github.com" as the url config string. This worked on linux and windows runners, but hung for a very long time when using the actions/checkout@v3 action on macos-latest. Removed ${{ secrets.GH_USER }}: and the actions/checkout@v3 step completed in less than a second.

Can we get someone to look into this? If the git config works on other runners, why doesn't it work on macos?