phacility/phabricator · error · Exception

Trying to acquire an active lease on a pending resource. You

Error message

Trying to acquire an active lease on a pending resource. You can not immediately activate leases on resources which need time to start up.

What it means

A lease can request immediate activation (activateWhenAcquired) so that acquisition and activation happen in one step, giving callers a ready-to-use ACTIVE lease. That is only legal if the resource it lands on is already past startup: acquiring-and-activating onto a resource still in STATUS_PENDING would promise an interface that does not exist yet, so acquireOnResource() refuses. Resources that allocate asynchronously (hosts that take time to boot) routinely sit in PENDING, making this a normal outcome of requesting immediate activation.

Source

Thrown at src/applications/drydock/storage/DrydockLease.php:236

    $actual_status = $this->getStatus();
    if ($actual_status != $expect_status) {
      throw new Exception(
        pht(
          'Trying to acquire a lease on a resource which is in the wrong '.
          'state: status must be "%s", actually "%s".',
          $expect_status,
          $actual_status));
    }

    if ($this->activateWhenAcquired) {
      $new_status = DrydockLeaseStatus::STATUS_ACTIVE;
    } else {
      $new_status = DrydockLeaseStatus::STATUS_ACQUIRED;
    }

    if ($new_status == DrydockLeaseStatus::STATUS_ACTIVE) {
      if ($resource->getStatus() == DrydockResourceStatus::STATUS_PENDING) {
        throw new Exception(
          pht(
            'Trying to acquire an active lease on a pending resource. '.
            'You can not immediately activate leases on resources which '.
            'need time to start up.'));
      }
    }

    // Before we associate the lease with the resource, we lock the resource
    // and reload it to make sure it is still pending or active. If we don't
    // do this, the resource may have just been reclaimed. (Once we acquire
    // the resource that stops it from being released, so we're nearly safe.)

    $resource_phid = $resource->getPHID();
    $hash = PhabricatorHash::digestForIndex($resource_phid);
    $lock_key = 'drydock.resource:'.$hash;
    $lock = PhabricatorGlobalLock::newLock($lock_key);

    try {

View on GitHub (pinned to 5720a38cfe)

Solutions

Do not force immediate activation: acquire normally (two-phase), then trigger activation via the lease update worker once the resource becomes ACTIVE
Have the allocator prefer resources already in STATUS_ACTIVE when the lease demands immediate activation
If you control resource allocation, set activateWhenAllocated on the resource so it is ACTIVE before leases attach
Retry land/lease request after the resource activation worker completes — the pending window is transient

Example fix

// before
$lease = $blueprint->newLease()
  ->setActivateWhenAcquired(true) // immediate activation
  ->queueForActivation();
// allocator picks a pending resource -> Exception

// after
$lease = $blueprint->newLease()
  // two-phase: acquire now, activate when resource is ready
  ->queueForActivation();

Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

// Only request immediate activation when the resource is already ACTIVE:
$immediate = ($resource->getStatus() === DrydockResourceStatus::STATUS_ACTIVE);
$lease = $blueprint->newLease();
if ($immediate) {
  $lease->setActivateWhenAcquired(true);
}
$lease->queueForActivation();

Try / catch

catch (Exception $ex) { on 'active lease on a pending resource', fall back to two-phase: acquire without immediate activation and let the lease update worker activate once the resource boots }

Prevention

Default to two-phase acquire-then-activate; use activateWhenAcquired only with known-ACTIVE resources
Prefer blueprints that set activateWhenAllocated on resources when synchronous leases are required
Design consumers to poll/wait for lease ACTIVation rather than expecting it synchronously

When it happens

Trigger: Creating a lease with setActivateWhenAcquired(true) (or the equivalent force-activation flag) and having the allocator select a freshly-created, still-PENDING resource; racing a resource that is allocated and leased in the same breath before the resource's own activation worker runs.

Common situations: Build systems that want a usable lease synchronously; host blueprints with slow provisioning (Almanac service hosts) where the resource stays PENDING for a while; tests that allocate and lease in one transaction.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of phacility/phabricator@5720a38cfe (2026-08-21). Data as JSON: /api/errors/64647d0ac2d09674. Report an issue: GitHub.