Checkout: Getting actions workflow failed at checkout stage with error

[ishuallawadhi]

: fatal: No url found for submodule path 'xyz' in .gitmodules Error: The process '/usr/bin/git' failed with exit code 128

[tchelovilar]

Did you managed to solve? I tried execute:
git rm --cached

But I got the error again.

[huihuiy02]

I have the same issue. Any ideas/

[tchelovilar]

@huihuiy02 Yes, I managed to fix removing the submodule:
git rm --cached <path_to_submodule>

And push the changes

But the error still happening in the self runner then I needed to remove the workflow folder from _work dir in the github runner home dir.

[huihuiy02]

Thanks, that works for me.

[cosimo]

But the error still happening in the self runner then I needed to remove the workflow folder from _work dir in the github runner home dir.

This seems to be related to the error for us. We are using self-hosted runners.
Wiping the entire _work directory "cures" the issue, though I'm not sure what the problem is. I will be looking into this.

UPDATE: this seems to be related to the fact that we are using this workaround to use a private actions repository for our org. The checkout happening in .github/private-actions is what is causing this issue, at least that's my current theory.

See also: https://github.com/actions/checkout/issues/385

[cosimo]

Would this be a suitable patch for src/git-auth-helper.js? It seems it would possibly solve the problem, hopefully not creating new ones.

diff --git a/src/git-auth-helper.ts b/src/git-auth-helper.ts
index 291d83b..6783f47 100644
--- a/src/git-auth-helper.ts
+++ b/src/git-auth-helper.ts
@@ -329,22 +329,24 @@ class GitAuthHelper {

   private async removeGitConfig(
     configKey: string,
     submoduleOnly: boolean = false
   ): Promise<void> {
     if (!submoduleOnly) {
       if (
         (await this.git.configExists(configKey)) &&
         !(await this.git.tryConfigUnset(configKey))
       ) {
         // Load the config contents
         core.warning(`Failed to remove '${configKey}' from the git config`)
       }
     }

-    const pattern = regexpHelper.escape(configKey)
-    await this.git.submoduleForeach(
-      `git config --local --name-only --get-regexp '${pattern}' && git config --local --unset-all '${configKey}' || :`,
-      true
-    )
+    if (this.settings.submodules) {
+      const pattern = regexpHelper.escape(configKey)
+      await this.git.submoduleForeach(
+        `git config --local --name-only --get-regexp '${pattern}' && git config --local --unset-all '${configKey}' || :`,
+        true
+      )
+    }
   }
 }

Tests are failing with this change. I'm currently looking into what this means.

[ace03uec]

https://github.com/actions/checkout/issues/354#issuecomment-759282642
This solution worked for our specific usecase, @cosimo could you point out which tests failed ? Perhaps we can check the same.

[cosimo]

#354 (comment)
This solution worked for our specific usecase, @cosimo could you point out which tests failed ? Perhaps we can check the same.

Sorry, I did abandon this solution and proposed patch since I discovered it's possible to side-step the whole issue by adding the private actions repository checkout directory to your .gitignore file and that solved all our issues permanently, also when using self-hosted runners.