GoogleContainerTools/skaffold · error

cannot write to temp file: %w

Error message

cannot write to temp file: %w

What it means

writeBuildArtifacts writes the marshaled JSON to the temp file. If f.Write fails after successful creation, this error is returned, aborting post-renderer setup. It indicates an I/O problem on an already-open temp file handle.

Source

Thrown at pkg/skaffold/helm/util.go:45

)

// copy of cmd/skaffold/app/flags.BuildOutputs
type buildOutputs struct {
	Builds []graph.Artifact `json:"builds"`
}

func writeBuildArtifacts(builds []graph.Artifact) (string, func(), error) {
	buildOutput, err := json.Marshal(buildOutputs{builds})
	if err != nil {
		return "", nil, fmt.Errorf("cannot marshal build artifacts: %w", err)
	}

	f, err := os.CreateTemp("", "builds*.yaml")
	if err != nil {
		return "", nil, fmt.Errorf("cannot create temp file: %w", err)
	}
	if _, err := f.Write(buildOutput); err != nil {
		return "", nil, fmt.Errorf("cannot write to temp file: %w", err)
	}
	if err := f.Close(); err != nil {
		return "", nil, fmt.Errorf("cannot close temp file: %w", err)
	}
	return f.Name(), func() { os.Remove(f.Name()) }, nil
}

// SanitizeFilePath is used to sanitize filepaths that are provided to the `setFiles` flag
// helm `setFiles` doesn't work with the unescaped filepath separator (\) for Windows or if there are unescaped tabs and spaces in the directory names.
// So we escape all odd count occurrences of `\` for Windows, and wrap the entire string in quotes if it has spaces.
// This is very specific to the way helm handles its flags.
// See https://github.com/helm/helm/blob/d55c53df4e394fb62b0514a09c57bce235dd7877/pkg/cli/values/options.
// Otherwise the windows `syscall` package implements its own sanitizing for command args that's used by `exec.Cmd`.
// See https://github.com/golang/go/blob/6951da56b0ae2cd4250fc1b0350d090aed633ac1/src/syscall/exec_windows.go#L27
func SanitizeFilePath(s string, isWindowsOS bool) string {
	if len(s) == 0 {
		return `""`
	}

View on GitHub (pinned to a1189de023)

Solutions

1. Check free space on the temp filesystem and clean up (`df -h; rm -rf /tmp/builds*`)
2. Retry the operation after freeing disk/quota
3. Point TMPDIR at a different, healthy filesystem
4. If persistent, check dmesg/storage health for I/O errors

TD="${TMPDIR:-/tmp}"; [ "$(stat -f -c %a "$TD" 2>/dev/null || df --output=avail "$TD" | tail -1)" -gt 104857600 ] || { echo "insufficient space on temp filesystem"; exit 1; }

When it happens

Trigger: f.Write(buildOutput) returns an error mid-write: disk became full, the underlying device returned EIO, or (in rare fd-exhaustion/edge cases) the write is interrupted with no short-write handling.

Common situations: tmpfs filling up between create and write; failing disk or network storage backing TMPDIR; storage quota exceeded in CI.

Related errors

• could not write build-artifacts: %w
• cannot create temp file: %w
• cannot close temp file: %w
• strings.Join(errMsgs, "\n") (joined helm cleanup error messa
• Failed to install Helm plugin

AI-assisted analysis of GoogleContainerTools/skaffold@a1189de023 (2026-09-05). Data as JSON: /api/errors/180816d2ebb93733. Report an issue: GitHub.