actions / actions/setup-python
Rate limits cause a hard failure instead of retry
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- Dominant language
- TypeScript
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Description
Description:
This action fails when a GitHub API rate limit is encountered, e.g., https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/actions/runs/18688106891/job/53286544594
Run actions/setup-python@a26af69be951a213d495a4c3e4e4022e16d87065
Installed versions
GraalPy version 24.1 was not found in the local cache
Error: API rate limit exceeded for installation. If you reach out to GitHub Support for help, please include the request ID 5841:12068:2A62DF:B7984D:68F7A08C and timestamp 2025-10-21 15:02:36 UTC. For more on scraping GitHub and how it may affect your rights, please review our Terms of Service (https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service)
GitHub's rate limits have recently been reduced, and we're seeing far more failures from this.
While I'd generally expect setup-python to avoid hitting a rate-limited API, I'd also expect it to retry on spurious HTTP errors and handle rate limiting, especially for a first-party API.
Action version:
5.6.0
Platform:
- Ubuntu
- macOS
- Windows
Runner type:
- Hosted
- Self-hosted
Tools version:
Repro steps:
See description. Requires hitting a GitHub rate limit.
Expected behavior:
I expect the action to retry in a backoff, respecting the retry-after header.
Actual behavior:
The action hard fails.
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with the linked setup-python workflow failure and trace the action's GitHub API request path for Python installation. Reproduce the rate-limit response, then verify that the action retries with backoff and respects the retry-after header instead of hard-failing.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- github-actions, typescript
- Domain
- ci-cd
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 48/100