kubernetes/kops · error

cannot create request: %v

Error message

cannot create request: %v

What it means

Thrown by OpenURL when http.NewRequestWithContext rejects the URL while building the GET request. Go's request builder fails on URLs it cannot parse — missing scheme, control characters, or a malformed URL string — so this is an invalid-URL error surfacing before any network traffic.

Source

Thrown at upup/pkg/fi/http.go:148

	actual := &hashing.Hash{
		Algorithm: algorithm,
		HashValue: hasher.Sum(nil),
	}
	if hash != nil && !actual.Equal(hash) {
		return nil, fmt.Errorf("downloaded from %q but hash did not match expected %q", desturl, hash)
	}
	return actual, nil
}

// OpenURL opens a hardened HTTP GET stream for url.
func OpenURL(url string) (io.ReadCloser, error) {
	httpClient := newDownloadHTTPClient()

	ctx, cancel := context.WithTimeout(context.Background(), downloadTimeout)
	req, err := http.NewRequestWithContext(ctx, http.MethodGet, url, nil)
	if err != nil {
		cancel()
		return nil, fmt.Errorf("cannot create request: %v", err)
	}

	response, err := httpClient.Do(req)
	if err != nil {
		cancel()
		return nil, fmt.Errorf("error doing HTTP fetch of %q: %v", url, err)
	}

	// http.Client follows 3xx automatically, so anything outside 2xx that reaches us is a bug or a missing Location.
	if response.StatusCode < 200 || response.StatusCode > 299 {
		response.Body.Close()
		cancel()
		return nil, fmt.Errorf("unexpected response from %q: HTTP %s", url, response.Status)
	}

	return &cancelOnCloseReadCloser{ReadCloser: response.Body, cancel: cancel}, nil
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 4c8573c808)

Solutions

1. Fix the URL string: include the scheme (https://) and encode spaces/control characters
2. Check where the URL was composed (spec field, environment variable) for truncation or templating mistakes
3. Validate URLs with url.Parse before passing them to download helpers

When it happens

Trigger: Thrown at upup/pkg/fi/http.go:148 when the library encounters an invalid state.

Common situations: See trigger scenarios.

AI-assisted analysis of kubernetes/kops@4c8573c808 (2026-09-05). Data as JSON: /api/errors/1f0b0465dc4344db. Report an issue: GitHub.