What causes "failed to create discussion: %w" in cli/cli?

Read the wrapped cause after the colon - it carries the real reason (e.g. 'repository has discussions disabled')

failed to create discussion: %w

Error message

failed to create discussion: %w

What it means

A wrapper around discussionClient.Create failures that are total (the returned discussion is nil). Note the special case in the same block: if Create returns a non-nil discussion, the URL is printed to stdout, the raw error to stderr, and SilentError is returned instead - so this message only appears when nothing was created.

Source

Thrown at pkg/cmd/discussion/create/create.go:193

	}

	input := client.CreateDiscussionInput{
		CategoryID: category.ID,
		Title:      opts.Title,
		Body:       opts.Body,
		LabelIDs:   labelIDs,
	}

	opts.IO.StartProgressIndicator()
	discussion, err := c.Create(repo, input)
	opts.IO.StopProgressIndicator()
	if err != nil {
		if discussion != nil {
			fmt.Fprintln(opts.IO.Out, discussion.URL)
			fmt.Fprintln(opts.IO.ErrOut, err.Error())
			return cmdutil.SilentError
		}
		return fmt.Errorf("failed to create discussion: %w", err)
	}

	fmt.Fprintln(opts.IO.Out, discussion.URL)

	return nil
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 0eeec0b92e)

Solutions

Read the wrapped cause after the colon - it carries the real reason (e.g. 'repository has discussions disabled')
Check auth: gh auth status
Verify the category slug exists: gh api repos/OWNER/REPO/discussions/categories or re-run letting the CLI pick it
If the discussion URL was printed to stdout, creation actually succeeded with partial failures - do not retry blindly (duplicate discussions)

Example fix

# before
gh discussion create --title X --body Y --category nosuch  # failed to create discussion: ...

# after
gh discussion create --title X --body Y   # category picked interactively/validated

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Validate before calling

// pre-flight the two common total-failure causes
// 1) gh repo view -R owner/repo --json hasDiscussions  -> must be true
// 2) resolve category to a real slug before building input

Try / catch

discussion, err := c.Create(repo, input)
if err != nil {
    if discussion != nil {
        // URL already on stdout; log label failure, treat as success
        return nil
    }
    return fmt.Errorf("creating discussion: %w", err) // inspect wrapped cause
}

Prevention

Unwrap the %w cause - the actionable reason is inside
Watch stdout: a printed URL means creation succeeded (no retry -> avoids duplicates)
Pre-check auth and category before creating in automation

When it happens

Trigger: gh discussion create where the createDiscussion mutation itself fails: repository discussions disabled (see 744), invalid category ID, permission denied, network/GraphQL errors. Label-only failures take the partial-success branch and never produce this message.

Common situations: Expired or scoped-down tokens; category resolved from stale cache; GitHub API incidents; discussions disabled on target repo.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of cli/cli@0eeec0b92e (2026-08-15). Data as JSON: /api/errors/4444df117d7eb7a6. Report an issue: GitHub.