Improved error message when a required os lib is missing
Maintainers usually reply within 1 day
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 55/100
- Issue type
- Feature
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Activity status
- Active
- Tech stack
- github-actions, node.js, typescript, ubuntu
- Domain
- developer-experience, devops
Research direction
Start by tracing the Node installation and verification flow in the action; the issue does not name specific files or tests. Check how the action handles a failed Node executable and whether it can identify a missing system library such as libatomic1. Done means a failure caused by a missing library gives a clearer error than exit code 127, with relevant tests covering that message.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Description:
When trying to upgrade our application from node 24 to 26 the setup node failed with the following error:
Run actions/setup-node@v7
Attempting to download 26.12.1...
Not found in manifest. Falling back to download directly from Node
Acquiring 26.12.1 - x64 from https://nodejs.org/dist/v26.12.1/node-v26.12.1-linux-x64.tar.gz
Extracting ...
/usr/bin/tar xz --strip 1 --warning=no-unknown-keyword --overwrite -C /home/runner/_work/_temp/80f11687-6f0f-4adc-850c-6c97cf44d2e0 -f /home/runner/_work/_temp/e4551be6-f2d4-4553-8e19-c7704a200d29
Adding to the cache ...
Done
Error: Node installation failed. Node may not be installed or not on PATH: The process '/home/runner/_work/_tool/node/26.12.1/x64/bin/node' failed with exit code 127
I figured out that our self hosted runners based on Ubuntu 24.04 did not have the required lib libatomic1 installed. After installing this it worked as expected. This was introduced as a requirement in node 25.
What would be great would be if the action could provide me with a better error message like. Node failed to install because of a missing system lib. Instead of exit code 127
Justification:
To make it easier to find out why the install failed.
Are you willing to submit a PR?
Yes
- Dominant language
- TypeScript
- Stars
- 5k
- Forks
- 1.7k
- Avg merge
- 2d 4h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 1
Getting set up
- No Dockerfile or Docker Compose file
- Has a pull request template
- No contributing guide
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.
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