windmill-labs/windmill · error · Error

Job ${jobId} was not successful: ${JSON.stringify(error)}

Error message

Job ${jobId} was not successful: ${JSON.stringify(error)}

What it means

When waiting on a Windmill job by id, the poller sees the job completed but its result carries an error field instead of a successful result. The client throws an Error embedding the jobId and a JSON dump of the error object so the script's own failure is visible to the caller of runScript/waitJob.

Source

Thrown at backend/windmill-runtime-nativets/src/windmill-client.js:9919

  const jobId = await runScriptAsync(path, hash_, args);
  return await waitJob(jobId, verbose);
}
async function waitJob(jobId, verbose = false) {
  while (true) {
    const resultRes = await getResultMaybe(jobId);
    const started = resultRes.started;
    const completed = resultRes.completed;
    const success = resultRes.success;
    if (!started && verbose) {
      console.info(`job ${jobId} has not started yet`);
    }
    if (completed) {
      const result = resultRes.result;
      if (success) {
        return result;
      } else {
        const error = result.error;
        throw new Error(
          `Job ${jobId} was not successful: ${JSON.stringify(error)}`
        );
      }
    }
    if (verbose) {
      console.info(`sleeping 0.5 seconds for jobId: ${jobId}`);
    }
    await new Promise((resolve2) => setTimeout(resolve2, 500));
  }
}
async function getResultMaybe(jobId) {
  !clientSet && setClient();
  const workspace = getWorkspace();
  return await JobService.getCompletedJobResultMaybe({ workspace, id: jobId });
}
var STRIP_COMMENTS =
  /(\/\/.*$)|(\/\*[\s\S]*?\*\/)|(\s*=[^,\)]*(('(?:\\'|[^'\r\n])*')|("(?:\\"|[^"\r\n])*"))|(\s*=[^,\)]*))/gm;
var ARGUMENT_NAMES = /([^\s,]+)/g;

View on GitHub (pinned to e474e8803c)

Solutions

1. Inspect the JSON error payload in the message — it names the root cause (script exception, worker crash, denied, timeout).
2. Open the job's run page in the Windmill UI / GET /jobs/u/get/{jobId} for the full logs and stack trace.
3. Fix the underlying script bug or pass correct args; re-run.
4. If the error is transient (worker OOM, timeout), increase limits or retry with backoff.

Example fix

// before
const result = await windmill.runScript(path, hash_, args); // throws on job error
// after
try {
  const result = await windmill.runScript(path, hash_, args);
} catch (e) {
  const detail = /Job \S+ was not successful: (.*)/.exec(e.message);
  if (detail) console.error('Job failed:', JSON.parse(detail[1]));
  throw e;
}

// Validate args against the script's signature before running
const sig = await client.getScriptArgsByPath({ workspace, path });
for (const req of sig.args.filter(a => a.has_default === false)) {
  if (!(req.name in args)) throw new Error(`Missing arg ${req.name} for ${path}`);
}

function isJobFailure(e) { return /Job \S+ was not successful:/.test(e?.message ?? ''); }
function parseJobError(e) { const m = /Job \S+ was not successful: (.*)$/.exec(e.message); return m ? JSON.parse(m[1]) : null; }

try {
  const result = await windmill.runScript(path, hash_, args);
} catch (e) {
  if (isJobFailure(e)) {
    const jobError = parseJobError(e);
    console.error('Underlying job error:', jobError);
    // fetch full logs via GET /jobs/u/get/logs/{jobId}
  }
  throw e;
}

When it happens

Trigger: Calling runScript/runScriptAsync + waiting for the resulting job when the executed script throws, is denied (job error: permissions, rate limit), or fails at runtime; result.error is populated on completion and this branch fires instead of returning the result.

Common situations: The child script itself raised an exception, input args didn't match the script signature, the script exceeded its timeout or memory limit, or the worker crashed the job.

Related errors

• Timed out after ${Math.round(CASCADE_JOB_TIMEOUT_MS / 60000)
• Timed out waiting for job ${jobId}
• ${timeoutMessage}
• reached timeout
• Failed to poll dependencies job ${jobId}: ${e?.message ?? e}

AI-assisted analysis of windmill-labs/windmill@e474e8803c (2026-09-03). Data as JSON: /api/errors/3d22eb8fa0cac488. Report an issue: GitHub.