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GitHub Actions

Diagnose runner waits, permission failures, and workflow identity drift.

Open the exact workflow run and find the first failing job. Later failures can be consequences of that job.

Job waits for a runner

“Waiting for a runner to pick up this job” is normally GitHub-hosted runner capacity. It is not the dependency quarantine. Wait for the status to change. Check GitHub service status when the wait is unusually long.

Workflow cannot create a pull request

Confirm the job has the required contents and pull-requests permissions. Then confirm the organization setting Allow GitHub Actions to create and approve pull requests is enabled. Branch protection still applies.

Deployment approval is missing

Confirm the job declares environment: npm. Confirm that the environment allows main and has a required reviewer. A maintainer cannot approve their own deployment when the selected protection rule forbids it.

A third-party service is stale

Confirm the GitHub App has repository access. Check whether CodeRabbit, Renovate, Vercel, or pkg.pr.new reports the current pull request SHA. Rerun only after the integration is authorized for the repository.

A Node runtime warning appears

An action can target a deprecated internal Node runtime even when the workflow uses a current Node version. Update the action to a current reviewed commit SHA. Do not change the package runtime only to hide an action warning.