GitHub API occassionaly returns 'Bad credentials' despite rate limit not being exceeded

[xgidiussenjensent-els]

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I have a Jenkins pipeline, which makes a number of requests to the GitHub API.

While 99% of the requests are successful, GitHub API occassionaly returns this response:

{
  "message": "Bad credentials",
  "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/rest"
}

I was suspecting it to be an exceeded rate limit, so I guarded against this by fetching and printing out the rate limits before each GitHub API request:

curl -s -u <username:password> https://api.github.com/rate_limit

It shows that everytime I get a 'Bad credentials' response, the remaining rate limits fetched right before were high.

I have tried having the pipeline retry a number of times with a 15 second delay between retries. Sometimes this works and the pipeline is able to proceed, while other times it gets 'Bad credentials' in all the retries.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Any suggestions?

Thanks

[ghostinhershell]

Hi @xgidiussenjensent-els 👋🏾

Thanks so much for reaching out in our community. Bad credential errors are sometimes difficult to troubleshoot at face value because they don't happen consistently and there are a couple of things that can cause them. The best option to resolve this is to adhere to best practices that avoid the most common causes:

• Cache access tokens and reuse them until they expire. Don't generate a new token for every invocation.
• Avoid making many simultaneous requests immediately after generating a new access token.
• Retry failed operations with exponential backoff (up to a reasonable maximum delay).
• Ensure that apps retry the request at least once after receiving a 401 error, but with a slight delay to allow the database to catch up.
• If you have multiple integrators querying the same endpoint, you can also attempt to reduce the overall number of requests to that particular overloaded endpoint.

And, if all else fails, I recommend opening a ticket on our Support page. They have access to the tools that it would take to dig into this issue a bit deeper. This is only recommended if you've tried the suggestions above and you're still running into this issue.

Let us know if you have any additional questions!

[xgidiussenjensent-els]

Thanks a lot for your answer, @ghostinhershell

We are following the best practices wrt. rate limit errors:
https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/best-practices-for-using-the-rest-api?apiVersion=2022-11-28#handle-rate-limit-errors-appropriately

What we experience wrt. the GitHub API rate limits seems a bit odd.
During most of the Jenkins pipeline, when we log out the remaining GitHub rate limits, they are somewhere between 14,000 and 15,000.
Then, when we get a 'bad credentials' response from the API, it has dropped to 60.

In that case, we look at the x-ratelimit-reset header value from the rate_limit API endpoint.
In these cases, it seems to always be 60 minutes in the future.
So we wait for the rate limit to reset + an additional 5 minutes.

This repeats itself five times, after which the pipeline is aborted.

Regarding access tokens:
We have the same GitHub user that we use for each pipeline run, and we reuse that user's access token for every pipeline run.
Is that something we should do differently?

Thanks,
Thomas Jensen

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