scheduled runs started to fail Aug 19, 2025

[alecor191]

We've been using this action for years now and it worked perfectly. Starting last week (Aug 19, 2025) however, the action started to fail. What makes it hard to understand the reason is that there are no logs related to the error. We tried enable verbose: true as well as GitHub Action debug logs, but nothing shows any useful information. The action just fails.

The only difference between a passing and a failed execution is that in the former, in the logs we see at the end some information about the pushed tag. In the failing case that part is just missing.

What's worth mentioning:

• we have a 100% repro since Aug 19, 2025 if the workflow run was a scheduled run.
• It works 100% of the time if we trigger that exact same workflow manually in GitHub.

We tried everything we could think of, but without any luck. Do you have any suggestion on how to troubleshoot this further? Or do you have any thoughts on what the issue could be?

Logs of a successful run:

Bumping tag v4.14.652 - New tag v4.14.653
EVENT: creating local tag v4.14.653
EVENT: pushing tag v4.14.653 to origin
2025-08-19T11:30:50Z: **pushing tag v4.14.653 to repo <redacted>
  "ref": "refs/tags/v4.14.653",
  "node_id": "<redacted>",
  "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/<redacted>/git/refs/tags/v4.14.653",
  "object": {
    "sha": "<redacted>",
    "type": "commit",
    "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/<redacted>/git/commits/<redacted>"
  }
}

Logs of failed run:

Bumping tag v4.14.653 - New tag v4.14.654
EVENT: creating local tag v4.14.654
EVENT: pushing tag v4.14.654 to origin
2025-08-20T11:29:17Z: **pushing tag v4.14.654 to repo <redacted>

The way we use the action:

  steps:
    ...
    - id: bump-version-tag
      uses: anothrNick/github-tag-action@1
      name: Bump version and push tag
      env:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ inputs.github_token }}
        DEFAULT_BUMP: patch
        WITH_V: true

[jisaak-cambian]

Oh good, I'm not going crazy, and it's not just us that is encountering this problem. Have you found a solution or a workaround?

[alecor191]

We found a repo from the author where he uses the following:

      - name: Bump version and push tag
        uses: anothrNick/github-tag-action@master
        env:
          ...
          GIT_API_TAGGING: false # uses git cli

See json-tree-service project.

That did the trick for us in the failing workflow.

However, this has a potentially undesired side effect: in another case, we use this action not only to bump the patch version number (and add a corresponding tag), but also update major/minor tags to point to the latest commit.

E.g. let's say we have a new commit a1234 and thus want to bump the current latest version v1.2.3 to v1.2.4: not only should there be a new tag v1.2.4 pointing to commit a1234, but also existing tags v1 and v1.2 should be updated to point to commit a1234.

This works out-of-the-box when the action uses GitHub APIs (GIT_API_TAGGING: true, default behavior), but doesn't work with GIT_API_TAGGING: false.

[anothrNick]

Hi @alecor191 , can you try pinning to a minor version? Perhaps 1.74.0 or even 1.73.0 ?