Intermittent failures trying to get URL asset URL

[beppler]

Most of the time the action works, but sometimes we receive the following error during the workflow execution:

jq: error (at <stdin>:1): Cannot index string with string "tag_name"

It appears to happen on this line of the script:

  asset_url=$(
      curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/peak/s5cmd/releases |
          jq --arg tag "${tag}" --arg asset_name "${asset_name}" '.[]| select(.tag_name==$tag) | .assets[].browser_download_url | select(. | test(".+" + $asset_name + "$"))' | xargs
  )

It appears that the releases endpoint responded with a invalid json, but I can't confirm it.

[lowlydba]

👋🏻 2026 here!

I am fairly sure the above error message is a symptom of GitHub API rate limiting.

GitHub rate-limits unauthenticated api.github.com calls to ~60 requests/hour per source IP, and GitHub-hosted runners share IP pools across the whole fleet, so that quota gets exhausted by unrelated jobs. When rate-limited, the API returns {"message": "API rate limit exceeded..."} (an object, not the expected array), and jq '.[]' chokes trying to index its string values, exiting with code 5.

Options (not mutually exclusive)

Option A

Add more elegant error handling, so the user sees its a rate-limiting problem and not a malformed JSON in most cases. At least consumers understand the root cause of the issue, then.

Option B

Add a (default?) input to the action for a token, and let curl utilize GITHUB_TOKEN so that it gets the MUCH higher authenticated rate limits imposed (starting at ~5k/hour and going up from there). This realistically should fix the issue outright.