Error in module creation : Could not find a Docker/Singularity container (Unexpected response code `500`

[scorreard]

Hi! Running into an error when creating module, maybe it would be great to mention it in the tutorial as other people ran into the same issue yesterday : https://nf-co.re/developers/tutorials/dsl2_modules_tutorial

Issue description : I tried to create a module, and it cannot ding a singularity / docker container while it exists (probably the server is down)

(nf-core) Solennes-MacBook-Air:modules solennecorreard$ nf-core modules create smoove

                                      ,--./,-.
      ___     __   __   __   ___     /,-._.--~\
|\ | |__  __ /  ` /  \ |__) |__         }  {
| \| |       \__, \__/ |  \ |___     \`-._,-`-,
                                      `._,._,'

nf-core/tools version 2.7.dev0 - https://nf-co.re

INFO Repository type: modules create.py:99 INFO Press enter to use default values (shown in brackets) or type your own responses. ctrl+click create.py:103 underlined text to open links.
INFO Using Bioconda package: 'bioconda::smoove=0.2.8' create.py:171 INFO Could not find a Docker/Singularity container (Unexpected response code 500 for create.py:200 https://api.biocontainers.pro/ga4gh/trs/v2/tools/smoove/versions/smoove-0.2.8)

Solution : Cancel the module creation, go get a coffee, try again OR Add it manually later in the module creation process

You can come and see us at the module table if that's not clear :)

[robsyme]

We could check the response code and retry the image fetch on 500 or even 5XX, but the challenge is that there might be other reasons why biocontainers might return a 5XX response code, and not all of those errors will be fixed by a retry.

One option might be to auto-retry a couple of times with a sleep in between?

[apeltzer]

We've seen these increasingly in the last days - might also be that we hit some API limits on the biocontainers API. Not sure if we can debug this very easily, retry might be an option with a sleep as per @robsyme 's suggestion 🤔

[EmelineFavreau]

It seems that it is not a Documentation issue, but a template level change. I'll remove the documentation label.