setup-tinytex does not install tinytex without failling as a step in the workflow

[cderv]

On windows, I have a failing TinyTeX installation. However, the step shows as success on GHA.
It took me sometimes to understand that there was an error as I was confident the step was succeeded because the workflow has no stopped. I think the actions should clearly fail to prevent from misleading bug search.

Here an example of this :
https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/pull/1958/checks?check_run_id=1443184428#step:6:33

It seems the actions is failing due to a timeout but that is another topic. This issue is only about a clear fail of the setup-tinytex action if nothing was installed.

[cderv]

Regarding error in the actions we get

• problem of timeout that cause no zip to be download

Invoke-WebRequest : The operation has timed out.

• Leads to an error in the script

(node:6072) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: The process 'D:\a\_temp\install-windows.bat' failed with exit code 1

but no error in the action

(node:6072) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection. This error originated either by throwing inside of an async function without a catch block, or by rejecting a promise which was not handled with .catch(). (rejection id: 1)
(node:6072) [DEP0018] DeprecationWarning: Unhandled promise rejections are deprecated. In the future, promise rejections that are not handled will terminate the Node.js process with a non-zero exit code.

[cderv]

It seems the actions is failing due to a timeout but that is another topic. This issue is only about a clear fail of the setup-tinytex action if nothing was installed.

As note, about this, it happens "sometimes" and not other. I believe there could be a timeout in the underlying infrastructure to download the TinyTeX bundle through yihui.org/tinytex/ that redirect to appveyor.

FYI @yihui

[yihui]

I feel this will be hard to debug since it only happens "sometimes". The error "Invoke-WebRequest : The operation has timed out" seems to be from https://github.com/yihui/tinytex/blob/e1b43e503642bde86f00ec6428eb7f2e0faca566/tools/install-bin-windows.bat#L19 but I have no idea why it could time out. If the redirect to AppyVeyor is the culprit, setting the env var TINYTEX_VERSION (e.g., to 2020.11) will make it download from Github releases (but Github release assets are actually hosted on Amazon S3, so they'd also be redirected).

[cderv]

We've made a change in the script install-bin-windows.bat so that:

• it uses another download method that should be less problematic with TinyTeX binary size
• fix the script so that exit code are returned for the action to correctly catch and throw an error. I believe this was the reason why the action did not stopped. Though I am not sure as there was an UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: coming from the action.

Anyway, what was done in the script should improve this installation, and hopefully stop the workflow if an error is happening during the installation.

[sckott]

@cderv any way to use the fix you made in rstudio/tinytex@b2d1bae in GH Actions?

[cderv]

You should have nothing to do if you use r-lib/setup-tinytex@v1. The action will download the script from tinytex repo directly so it will contains the changes I made.

Do you still have issues ?

[sckott]

yeah, still having problems. for example https://github.com/ropensci/parzer/runs/1906575841?check_suite_focus=true#step:5:1

[cderv]

Interesting. This is a new one.
But The improvement I mentioned above are for Windows only and your error is in Linux. So it won't help.
We had issues with windows only before.

This error is again hidden because the action does not finish by an error. So the Workflow does not error at tinytex installation step. That is too bad.

However the issue with the download is from tinytex script. It seems you got a 308 redirect instead of 301. It was working for me 4 hours acid. I'll have a look tomorrow into that.
Does it happen all the time since or some times as it was the case with windows?

There is some redirects happening and maybe this could cause troubles. One solution I explored was to directly download from the latest GitHub release. This is not yet use and still live hidden in my fork there: https://github.com/cderv/actions/tree/tinytex-bin/setup-tinytex-bin
In case it can help if you're stuck.

[sckott]

I just noticed this on Linux in the past few hours, but could have started earlier. At least in that repo, the last build without an error on that step on Linux was 5 days ago

[cderv]

@sckott I think I got to the bottom of it. This is a combination of changes.

• First, it seems the current action does not work on Ubuntu 16, but work on others. See the test I made (https://github.com/cderv/test-actions/actions/runs/571177677) - so this is related to Ubuntu 16.04
• The action @v1 now use the https://github.com/yihui/tinytex/blob/master/tools/install-bin-unix.sh since 5f1c134 . This script will run wget to get binary for installation. However, there is a 308 redirect that wget does not seem to follow. I think it was supported in 1.19.3 and Ubuntu 16.04 on Github action only have 1.17.1 (from the spec)
• If this explains the error, why the change in your action ? Previous, setup-tinytex@v1 was using the source installation https://github.com/yihui/tinytex/blob/master/tools/install-unix.sh, but the V1 tag was moved up in master and includes now the binary install.

I'll open an issue in TinyTeX to add some tries maybe to see if we can use curl instead. Or just remove this 308 redirect thing to get directly the latest release. BTW it seems the redirect problem here is the consequence of an issue with yihui.org/tinytex/ - yihui/yihui.org#100

What you can do:

• You can revert to a previous commit of this action that still install from source

    - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-tinytex@cf900fc6074207cb2793ab036f32e1e35c6d84cd

• As mentioned above setup-tinytex does not install tinytex without failling as a step in the workflow #213 (comment), the script will download directly from Github release if you provide a binary version to use. There won't be 308 redirect so it will work.

    - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-tinytex@v1
      env: 
        TINYTEX_VERSION: 2021.02

I would do the latter - this will install a fix bundle but you can easily update tlmgr and the package after if needed. You can control the bundle installed with TINYTEX_INSTALLER. See https://github.com/yihui/tinytex-releases

Regarding this issue in r-lib/actions, it seems the wget error did not throw a workflow step error. I'll see why.

Hope it helps. Thanks for the report.

[sckott]

Thanks very much. I agree seems better to use the second option. And it worked! Thanks

[cderv]

@sckott this is now fixed on the TinyTeX side.

[sckott]

awesome, thanks!

[rubak]

I have been battling with this error as well. Thanks for providing a quick workaround solution. I also implemented option 2 above and it worked nicely, but afterwards I realized that due to the fix on the TinyTex side it was no longer necessary. Thanks anyway!

[gaborcsardi]

As I understand this is now fixed.

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