Troubleshoot issues

This page shows you how to resolve issues that you might encounter when using Workflows.

For more information, refer to monitoring and debugging Workflows.

Deployment errors

When a workflow is deployed, Workflows checks that the source code is free from errors and matches the language syntax. Workflows returns an error if one is found. The most common types of deployment errors are:

• Referencing an undefined variable, step, or subworkflow
• Incorrect syntax
  • Incorrect indentation
  • Missing or extraneous {, }, ", -, or :

For example, the following source code throws a deployment error because the return statement references an undefined variable, varC:

- step1:
    assign:
    - varA: "Hello"
    - varB: "World"
- step2:
    return: ${varC + varB}

This incorrect source code is used in the following Google Cloud console and gcloud CLI examples.

Could not deploy workflow: failed to build: error in step step2: error
evaluating return value: symbol 'varC' is neither a variable nor a
sub-workflow name (Code: 3)

ERROR: (gcloud.workflows.deploy) [INVALID_ARGUMENT] failed to build:
error in step step2: error evaluating return value: symbol 'varC' is neither
a variable nor a sub-workflow name

To resolve the issue, edit the workflow's source code. In this case, refer to varA instead of varC.

HTTP 403 service account permission errors

Your workflow execution fails when an HTTP server responds with an error code of 403. For example:

Permission 'iam.serviceaccounts.actAs' denied on service
account PROJECT_NUMBER-developer.gserviceaccount.comcompute@ (or it may not exist).

or

SERVICE_ACCOUNT does not have storage.objects.create access to the Google Cloud
Storage object. Permission 'storage.objects.create' denied on resource (or it may not exist).

Every workflow is associated with an IAM service account at the time the workflow is created. To resolve this issue, you must grant the service account one or more IAM roles that contain the minimum permissions required to manage your workflow. For example, if you want to let your workflow send logs to Cloud Logging, make sure the service account executing the workflow has been granted a role that includes the logging.logEntries.create permission. For more information, see Grant a workflow permission to access Google Cloud resources.

HTTP 404 No such object or Not found errors

When using the Cloud Storage connector, your workflow execution fails when an HTTP server responds with an error code of 404. For example:

HTTP server responded with error code 404
in step "read_input_file", routine "main", line: 13
{
  "body": "Not Found",
  "code": 404,
  ...
}

You should URL-encode object names to be path safe. You can use the url_encode and url_encode_plus functions to encode applicable characters when they appear in either the object name or query string of a request URL. For example:

- init:
    assign:
        - source_bucket: