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Versions start to get not found #1319
Description
Description:
Our CI randomly failed today with
Error: The version '3.8' with architecture 'x64' was not found for Ubuntu 24.04.
or
Error: The version '3.7' with architecture 'x64' was not found for Ubuntu 22.04.
Action version:
4237552 # v5.4.0
Platform:
- Ubuntu
- macOS
- Windows
Runner type:
- Hosted
- Self-hosted
Tools version:
3.7 & 3.8
Repro steps:
This is our workflow (part) which is unchanged for a while:
jobs:
python-linting:
runs-on: ubuntu-24.04
steps:
- name: set up Python
uses: actions/setup-python@42375524e23c412d93fb67b49958b491fce71c38 # v5.4.0
with:
python-version: 3.8
It suddenly starts failing seemingly randomly.
The error refers to
The list of all available versions can be found here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/actions/python-versions/main/versions-manifest.json
However 3.7 is available for 22.04 and 3.8 for 24.04:
"download_url": "https://github.com/actions/python-versions/releases/download/3.7.17-5356448435/python-3.7.17-linux-22.04-x64.tar.gz""download_url": "https://github.com/actions/python-versions/releases/download/3.8.18-12303122501/python-3.8.18-linux-24.04-x64.tar.gz"
How is it possible that this just started failing?
Activity
v-priya-kinthali commentedon May 29, 2026
Hello @Flamefire👋,
Thank you for reporting this issue and providing the detailed context and logs.
We have attempted to reproduce the problem on our end, but we were successfully able to install Python versions 3.7 and 3.8 on the specified Ubuntu runners using the same action version as your workflow. Everything appears to be working as expected at this time.
There may have been a temporary outage causing the failure. Could you please try rerunning your workflow to see if the issue persists? Thank you!
Flamefire commentedon May 29, 2026
Yes looks like a temporary issue. Maybe the error reporting can be improved as the error isn't that the versions didn't exist but either that downloading the list or files failed or some parsing failed.
An idea: Instead of showing basically "version x not available here, look in this file", the error could list all available version in the current runner/OS and the OSes where the requested version is available so one can easily change either without search through a file that is meant to be machine readable (only). What do you think about that?
v-priya-kinthali commentedon Jul 16, 2026
Hi @Flamefire,
The fix from PR #1332 has been merged into the main branch. The update improves handling of invalid or truncated versions-manifest.json responses by validating the manifest, retrying failed fetches with backoff, and reporting a clear failure if all retry attempts are exhausted.. The changes are available in
actions/setup-python@mainand will be included in an upcoming release.Regarding your suggestion to list all available versions in the error message- Thank you for the thoughtful idea! Unfortunately, the full set of versions across every supported runner/OS is quite large, and printing it inline would make the logs noisy and harder to read. For that reason, we point to the manifest, which stays complete and always up to date:
The list of all available versions can be found here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/actions/python-versions/main/versions-manifest.json
That said, the recent fix should reduce these errors, since transient manifest-fetch failures are now retried and reported clearly. We'll go ahead and close this issue. Please feel free to reach out if you run into any further problems. Thank you for your patience!