[bug] generic: GitHub Actions is temporarily unavailable

[behnazh-w]

The provenance generation on micronaut-core repository has failed after updating the provenance generator to v1.9.0 (and the error message is not helpful for debugging).

Looking into the logs, it fails at this step while creating the verifier, which seems to be a transient network issue? If that's the cause, the resilience of the generator needs to improve.

[laurentsimon]

Thanks for the issue @behnazh-w . Error is GitHub Actions is temporarily unavailable which is not under our control, afaik.

@steiza is there anything we can do? Is it something the repository uses can do (micronaut-core)?

[steiza]

I'm missing some context here. I think this is the error in question?

verify: creating verifier: 503 Service Unavailable: { "message": "GitHub Actions is temporarily unavailable. Please visit https://www.githubstatus.com/ for the status of our services.", "ref": "Ref A: AFAEB017732F4791BCCA752C39D20642 Ref B: BY3EDGE0120 Ref C: 2023-08-31T17:07:15Z" }

What is verify? Is that a CLI tool that's calling GitHub APIs?

There will definitely be intermittent (and hopefully short!) cases where GitHub APIs are not available. Of course it depends on the tolerance your application has, but I think it's reasonable to retry a few times over a few minutes before giving up and reporting a failure to the end user.

[laurentsimon]

You're correct, the code is https://github.com/slsa-framework/slsa-github-generator/blob/main/github/oidc.go#L173-L178. Thanks for the tip, cc'ing @ianlewis for the retry