chroma-core/chroma · warning

Failed to fetch package data: ${response.statusText}

Error message

Failed to fetch package data: ${response.statusText}

What it means

Thrown by the chromadb CLI's update check when the HTTP request to https://registry.npmjs.org/chromadb returns a non-OK status. The CLI fetches npm dist-tags to compare your installed version against latest; if the registry responds with an error status (proxy block, 404, 5xx, rate limit), this error aborts the check. It is a version-notification concern only, not a database or data problem.

Source

Thrown at clients/js/packages/chromadb/src/cli.ts:15

#!/usr/bin/env node
import semver from "semver";
import binding from "./bindings";

interface NpmPackageData {
  "dist-tags": {
    latest: string;
    [tag: string]: string;
  };
}

const getLatestVersion = async (packageName: string): Promise<string> => {
  const response = await fetch(`https://registry.npmjs.org/${packageName}`);
  if (!response.ok) {
    throw new Error(`Failed to fetch package data: ${response.statusText}`);
  }
  const data: NpmPackageData = await response.json();
  return data["dist-tags"].latest;
};

const update = async (): Promise<void> => {
  try {
    const installedVersion = process.env.CHROMADB_VERSION || "0.0.0";
    const latestVersion = await getLatestVersion("chromadb");

    if (semver.lt(installedVersion, latestVersion)) {
      console.log(`\nA new chromadb version (${latestVersion}) is available!`);
      console.log("\n\x1b[4mUpdat with npm\x1b[0m");
      console.log("npm install chromadb@latest");

      console.log("\n\x1b[4mUpdat with pnpm\x1b[0m");
      console.log("pnpm add chromadb@latest");

View on GitHub (pinned to aecdd12c8a)

Solutions

1. Check network access to https://registry.npmjs.org/chromadb from the same environment (curl -I).
2. Configure proxy environment variables (HTTPS_PROXY) so fetch goes through the allowed proxy.
3. Retry later if npm was returning a transient 5xx/429.
4. Ignore safely: this only affects the new-version notice, not CLI functionality — wrap or skip the update check if your workflow does not need it.

try {
  await getLatestVersion("chromadb"); // or run the CLI update check
} catch (e) {
  // Update notification only — never fail the workflow for it
  console.warn(`Update check skipped: ${(e as Error).message}`);
}

When it happens

Trigger: Running the chromadb CLI behind a corporate proxy/firewall that rejects or rewrites registry.npmjs.org; npm registry returning 404/429/5xx; a transparent proxy returning an error status page; offline environments where a proxy answers with a non-200.

Common situations: Locked-down corporate networks; CI with restricted egress; temporary npm registry outages; air-gapped machines with a misconfigured proxy.

Related errors

• Error calling Cloudflare Workers AI API: ${error.message}
• Failed to generate embeddings: ${response.statusText}
• Error calling Jina AI API: ${error.message}
• Error calling Together AI API: ${error.message}
• Error calling Chroma Embedding API: ${error.message}

AI-assisted analysis of chroma-core/chroma@aecdd12c8a (2026-08-16). Data as JSON: /api/errors/299b7c58056db671. Report an issue: GitHub.