What causes "failed to get current commit for state: %w" in gastownhall/beads?

Inspect the wrapped underlying error (%w) for the actual Dolt/driver failure and fix that first

failed to get current commit for state: %w

Error message

failed to get current commit for state: %w

What it means

During 'bd backup' export, after creating the backup, the code reads the current Dolt commit hash via store.GetCurrentCommit(ctx) to record it as a watermark in the backup state. If that read fails, the export is aborted and this wrapped error is returned. It indicates the Dolt storage layer could not report its HEAD commit despite the backup itself succeeding up to that point.

Source

Thrown at cmd/bd/backup_export.go:175

		// interval (checked by maybeAutoBackup via state.Timestamp)
		// applies to the next command. Without this, a sync that keeps
		// failing — e.g. a slow/overloaded shared Dolt server — retries
		// on EVERY bd command instead of once per interval, turning a
		// transient slowdown into a self-amplifying storm (the 2026-07
		// shared-dolt CPU-pin incident). LastDoltCommit is deliberately
		// left unchanged so change-detection still sees pending work and
		// a real backup runs once the failure clears.
		state.Timestamp = time.Now().UTC()
		if saveErr := saveBackupState(dir, state); saveErr != nil {
			debug.Logf("backup: failed to persist throttle state after error: %v\n", saveErr)
		}
		return nil, err
	}

	// Update watermarks
	currentCommit, err := store.GetCurrentCommit(ctx)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, fmt.Errorf("failed to get current commit for state: %w", err)
	}
	state.LastDoltCommit = currentCommit
	state.Timestamp = time.Now().UTC()

	if err := saveBackupState(dir, state); err != nil {
		return nil, err
	}

	return state, nil
}

// truncateHash returns the first 8 characters of a hash, or the full string if shorter.
func truncateHash(h string) string {
	if len(h) > 8 {
		return h[:8]
	}
	return h
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 71377f2769)

Solutions

Inspect the wrapped underlying error (%w) for the actual Dolt/driver failure and fix that first
Run 'bd dolt' style checks or re-initialize the database: ensure at least one commit exists (bd init / a sync creates commits)
Delete or repair the corrupted .beads/dolt state and restore from a previous backup
If auto-backup keeps failing, fix the DB then run 'bd backup sync' manually to refresh watermarks

Example fix

// before
state.LastDoltCommit = state.LastDoltCommit // stale value on failure
// after
currentCommit, err := store.GetCurrentCommit(ctx)
if err != nil {
	return nil, fmt.Errorf("failed to get current commit for state: %w", err)
}
state.LastDoltCommit = currentCommit

Defensive patterns

Strategy: retry

Validate before calling

// ensure the DB has at least one commit before backup
if out, err := exec.Command("bd", "list", "--limit", "1").Output(); err != nil || len(out) == 0 {
	return fmt.Errorf("database has no commits; run bd init / bd sync first")
}

Type guard

if store == nil || store.GetCurrentCommit == nil { /* cannot read commit watermark */ }

Try / catch

currentCommit, err := store.GetCurrentCommit(ctx)
if err != nil {
	var derr *driver.Error
	if errors.As(err, &derr) { /* repair/reinit DB */ }
	return nil, fmt.Errorf("failed to get current commit for state: %w", err)
}

Prevention

Never back up a workspace that has never been committed; run bd init + a sync first
Monitor disk health and Dolt directory integrity on backup hosts
Retry transient commit-read failures with backoff before failing the backup
Keep watermarks optional so a watermark read failure can degrade to a warning

When it happens

Trigger: store.GetCurrentCommit(ctx) returns an error inside runBackupExport, e.g. the Dolt database has no commits (empty/uninitialized dolt_dir), the Dolt session/engine is corrupted, or an underlying SQL/driver failure occurs while querying the commit log. Called from maybeAutoBackup and tests like TestRunBackupExport_PersistsThrottleOnFailure.

Common situations: Backing up a beads workspace whose .beads database directory exists but has never been committed; disk corruption or partial clone leaving the Dolt log unreadable; transient driver/IO errors during auto-backup after sync.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of gastownhall/beads@71377f2769 (2026-08-30). Data as JSON: /api/errors/18b44a171c37cf41. Report an issue: GitHub.