GoogleContainerTools/skaffold · error

failed to write manifest to file, err: %w

Error message

failed to write manifest to file, err: %w

What it means

The downloaded response body is copied into the temp file with io.Copy. Any read/write error mid-transfer (connection dropped, disk full, short write) is wrapped as 'failed to write manifest to file'.

Source

Thrown at pkg/skaffold/kubernetes/manifest/url.go:68

func downloadFromURL(destDir string, manifest string) (string, error) {
	if manifest == "" || !util.IsURL(manifest) {
		return "", fmt.Errorf("%s is not a valid URL", manifest)
	}

	resp, err := http.Get(manifest)
	if err != nil {
		return "", fmt.Errorf("failed to download manifest from %s, err : %w", manifest, err)
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	f, err := os.CreateTemp(destDir, "*.yaml")
	if err != nil {
		return "", fmt.Errorf("failed to create manifest file: %w", err)
	}
	defer f.Close()
	_, err = io.Copy(f, resp.Body)
	if err != nil {
		return "", fmt.Errorf("failed to write manifest to file, err: %w", err)
	}

	return f.Name(), nil
}

View on GitHub (pinned to a1189de023)

Solutions

1. Retry the download; check network stability and proxy timeouts
2. Free disk space if ENOSPC was the cause
3. Fetch the manifest manually with curl to confirm the server serves the full body

if err != nil {
    if errors.Is(err, syscall.ENOSPC) {
        // free disk space before retrying
    }
    // otherwise treat as transient network error: retry with backoff
    return err
}

When it happens

Trigger: io.Copy(f, resp.Body) returning an error: HTTP connection reset mid-body, context cancellation, or write failures to the temp file (ENOSPC).

Common situations: Flaky network or proxy timeouts on large manifests; disk filling up during CI; server closing connection before body completes.

Related errors

• failed to copy object to file: %v
• failed to create the tmp directory: %w
• failed to download manifest from %s, err : %w
• failed to read object: %v
• error copying file to GCS: %w

AI-assisted analysis of GoogleContainerTools/skaffold@a1189de023 (2026-09-05). Data as JSON: /api/errors/2b25cb35985d1130. Report an issue: GitHub.