Troubleshooting

Common failure modes and what they mean. Each section heading is a symptom.

No comment appeared on my PR

Check that the job has pull-requests: write and that the run is a real pull request — fork PRs get a read-only token and can't comment (see the security guide). On clean runs the prior comment is deleted by default; set comment-on-success: true to keep an "up to date" comment instead. comment: false disables PR commenting entirely.

No tracking issue appeared on my scheduled run

Tracking issues require open-tracking-issue: true, the issues: write permission, and a run without a pull request context — PR runs always use the PR comment instead. Check tracking-issue-url in the step outputs to confirm whether one was touched.

The action failed with a missing Package.resolved

In Swift manifest mode every manifest needs a resolved file next to it (e.g. Modules/Package.swift → Modules/Package.resolved). The action fails loudly rather than silently reporting incomplete results. Commit the resolved file, or point package-resolved-paths at its real location.

No updates found, but I know a newer version exists

Updates are detected from semver-style tags. By design, the following are skipped unless opted in:

• pre-releases (report-pre-releases: true)
• versions above your declared constraint (report-above-maximum: true)
• exact pins (check-when-exact: true)
• revision pins (check-revisions: true)

A dependency that doesn't publish version tags produces no updates, and ignore-repos or repo-rules-path may be suppressing the report (see the repository rules reference).

The parse-warnings output is non-zero / a dependency is missing from the report

A .package(...) declaration whose version requirement the parser doesn't recognize (or that has unbalanced parentheses) is skipped rather than guessed at. Skipped declarations are listed in the step summary and PR comment with a pre-filled link to open an issue — if the declaration is valid Swift, please report it.

The output says blocked=true

A dependency's host isn't in allow-hosts. Add the host (matching is exact and case-insensitive) or adjust your manifests; the error-message output names what was blocked.

It can't reach a private dependency

The runner must already be authenticated (SSH key or git credentials) to fetch private repos — the action doesn't manage credentials. Unreachable or auth-failing dependencies fail the run after bounded retries rather than reporting "no updates."

"Provide exactly one of…" error

Set either xcode-project-path or package-manifest-paths — not both, and not neither.

A later invocation in the same job failed before checking anything

setup-ruby: false skips Ruby setup and the bundle install, so it's only valid after an earlier invocation in the same job has already run setup with the same source mode (or a superset of the runtime dependencies). The action checks for Ruby, Bundler, and installed gems up front and fails with a clear error instead of a Bundler backtrace when the earlier setup is missing.