actions / actions/setup-python

Rate limits cause a hard failure instead of retry

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#1,232 5 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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feature request
Dominant language
TypeScript
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Merged PRs (30d)
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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

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. 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

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