What causes "GitHub response: ${response.status}" in Budibase/budibase?

Check the status in the message: 403/429 means rate limiting — add a GITHUB_TOKEN or reduce call frequency

GitHub response: ${response.status}

Error message

GitHub response: ${response.status}

What it means

getStars queries the public GitHub API for the Budibase repo's stargazers_count using fetch. Any non-ok HTTP response (rate limits, network errors surfacing as failure statuses, API downtime) triggers this generic error carrying only the status code.

Source

Thrown at packages/worker/src/api/controllers/global/github.ts:38

  const envelope = (await cache.get(CACHE_KEY, {
    useTenancy: false,
  })) as StarsCacheEnvelope | null
  if (envelope && envelope.expiresAt > Date.now()) {
    ctx.body = envelope.value
    return
  }

  try {
    const response = await fetch(GITHUB_REPO_URL, {
      headers: {
        Accept: "application/vnd.github+json",
        "User-Agent": USER_AGENT,
      },
      timeout: GITHUB_TIMEOUT_MS,
    })

    if (!response.ok) {
      throw new Error(`GitHub response: ${response.status}`)
    }

    const json = (await response.json()) as { stargazers_count?: number }
    const stars = json.stargazers_count

    if (typeof stars !== "number") {
      throw new Error("GitHub stars missing")
    }

    const value: GetGitHubStarsResponse = {
      stars,
      fetchedAt: new Date().toISOString(),
    }
    const toStore: StarsCacheEnvelope = {
      value,
      expiresAt: Date.now() + CACHE_TTL_MS,
    }

View on GitHub (pinned to a81a902e9a)

Solutions

Check the status in the message: 403/429 means rate limiting — add a GITHUB_TOKEN or reduce call frequency
Add caching/backoff so the endpoint is called less often
Retry after the rate-limit window resets (see X-RateLimit-Reset response header)
Verify api.github.com status if 5xx; confirm the repo path is correct if 404

Defensive patterns

Strategy: retry

Validate before calling

// check rate-limit headroom before calling
const res = await fetch("https://api.github.com/rate_limit")
const { remaining } = (await res.json()).resources.core
if (remaining <= 0) throw new Error("GitHub rate limit exhausted")

Type guard

function isGitHubOk(res: Response): boolean {
  return res.ok && res.status >= 200 && res.status < 300
}

Try / catch

try {
  const stars = await getStars()
} catch (err) {
  if (err.message.startsWith("GitHub response: 403")) {
    // rate limited: back off / use a token; else fall back to cached value
  }
}

Prevention

Cache the stargazers value instead of calling GitHub per request
Use an authenticated GITHUB_TOKEN to raise the rate limit
Respect X-RateLimit-Reset and apply exponential backoff
Monitor GitHub API status for incidents causing 5xx responses

When it happens

Trigger: GitHub API returns 403 (rate limit without a token), 5xx outages, 404 if the repo path changed, or any other non-2xx response from the fetch call.

Common situations: Unauthenticated GitHub API rate-limiting on shared egress IPs (60 req/hour), CI environments with heavy outbound calls, temporary GitHub incidents.

Understand the failure class

Background: 'Something went wrong' / 'Request failed (500)' / 'HTTP error! status: 404' — what failed HTTP requests actually mean and how to find the real cause — this error's family across 28 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of Budibase/budibase@a81a902e9a (2026-08-29). Data as JSON: /api/errors/2ddc1f2d889e79e2. Report an issue: GitHub.