kubernetes/kops · error

error parsing location

Error message

error parsing location %q - not a valid URI

What it means

VFSContext.ReadFile parses a location string with net/url.Parse when it contains "://" and is not a file:// URL. If url.Parse fails, the location is not a syntactically valid URI, so kOps cannot determine the scheme and returns this error instead of reading any file.

Solutions

1. Print the exact location value in the error and run url.Parse on it in a scratch program to see the specific parse error
2. Fix the malformed URI in the config/flag/environment value that produced it
3. Validate the location with url.ParseRequestURI before passing it to ReadFile
4. If the value is a local path that happens to contain '://', restructure it or use a file:// prefix explicitly

Example fix

// before
kops.ReadFile(cfg.BaseURL + "/channel") // BaseURL = "https://example.com "/a b"
// after
u, err := url.Parse(cfg.BaseURL + "/channel")
if err != nil {
	return fmt.Errorf("invalid channel location: %w", err)
}
data, err := kops.ReadFile(u.String())

func validateVFSLocation(loc string) error {
	if !strings.Contains(loc, "://") || strings.HasPrefix(loc, "file://") {
		return nil
	}
	if _, err := url.Parse(loc); err != nil {
		return fmt.Errorf("invalid vfs location %q: %w", loc, err)
	}
	return nil
}

func isParsableURI(loc string) bool {
	u, err := url.Parse(loc)
	return err == nil && u.Scheme != ""
}

data, err := vfs.Context.ReadFile(loc)
if err != nil && strings.Contains(err.Error(), "not a valid URI") {
	return fmt.Errorf("check the location value %q: %w", loc, err)
}

When it happens

Trigger: Calling ReadFile (directly or via updateAddon, LoadAddons, LoadChannel, Run, transferFile, findHash) with a location containing "://" that url.Parse rejects - e.g. control characters, malformed percent-encoding like 'https://host/%zz', or a bad scheme such as 'ht tp://x' built by string concatenation.

Common situations: Typo in a --state store or addon/channel URL in cluster config; programmatic construction of URLs from unvalidated user input or environment variables; shell interpolation inserting spaces into a URI.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid URL" / "URL cannot be empty": fix the malformed or missing URL behind request-construction failures — this error's family across 50 libraries.

Related errors

• invalid google cloud storage path
• cannot parse VFS path
• clusterName is required
• error parsing ConfigStore.Base
• error parsing locationStore=

AI-assisted analysis of kubernetes/kops@4c8573c808 (2026-09-05). Data as JSON: /api/errors/38caa224beb4d8fc. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at util/pkg/vfs/context.go:132

	ctx := context.TODO()

	var opts vfsOptions
	// Exponential backoff, starting with 500 milliseconds, doubling each time, 5 steps
	opts.backoff = wait.Backoff{
		Duration: 500 * time.Millisecond,
		Factor:   2,
		Steps:    5,
	}

	for _, option := range options {
		option(&opts)
	}

	if strings.Contains(location, "://") && !strings.HasPrefix(location, "file://") {
		// Handle our special case schemas
		u, err := url.Parse(location)
		if err != nil {
			return nil, fmt.Errorf("error parsing location %q - not a valid URI", location)
		}

		switch u.Scheme {
		case "metadata":
			switch u.Host {
			case "gce":
				httpURL := "http://169.254.169.254/computeMetadata/v1/" + u.Path
				httpHeaders := make(map[string]string)
				httpHeaders["Metadata-Flavor"] = "Google"
				return c.readHTTPLocation(httpURL, httpHeaders, opts)
			case "aws":
				return c.readAWSMetadata(ctx, u.Path)
			case "digitalocean":
				httpURL := "http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1" + u.Path
				return c.readHTTPLocation(httpURL, nil, opts)
			case "openstack":
				httpURL := "http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/" + u.Path
				return c.readHTTPLocation(httpURL, nil, opts)

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