Troubleshooting GitHub Rate Limit Issues with Stack Triggers

Last updated: November 3, 2026

If your stacks are unexpectedly failing to trigger runs for certain Pull Requests, or runs fail to be created, this may be due to GitHub API rate limiting on the GitHub App installation. When rate limits are hit, Spacelift cannot fetch required PR metadata (like labels and file diffs) from GitHub, which can cause push policies to fail and interrupt runs and related stack actions.

Symptoms

The main symptom is inconsistent behavior where some PRs fail to trigger runs while identical PRs do trigger runs as expected. This happens because rate limiting is temporary - once the limit resets, normal operation resumes.

You may also see an error like the following in your Spacelift run logs:

could not create run: could not create runs: could not populate run options: could not refresh cache: could not get runtime config: could not query GitHub API: API rate limit already exceeded for installation ID XXXXXXXX.Common Causes of Rate Limiting

This is caused by the primary rate limit for GitHub App installations.

Common Causes of Rate Limiting

  • Heavy use of Pull Request comments (including PR comments, aggregated checks, and notification policies targeting VCS)

  • A large number of stacks reacting to GitHub events through a single integration

How to Resolve

The recommended solution is to distribute API load across multiple GitHub integrations:

  1. Review your GitHub integration usage. Check whether a single GitHub App integration is serving a high number of active stacks or receiving a high volume of GitHub events.

  2. Create additional GitHub VCS integrations in Spacelift by following our guide to creating custom GitHub applications

  3. Configure your stacks to use different GitHub integrations, spreading the API load across multiple rate limit quotas. Each integration has its own separate rate limit quota, which reduces the likelihood of hitting the limit.

You can verify if rate limiting is the cause by checking your notification inbox for messages containing "API rate limit exceeded" or by adding diagnostic output to your push policies.

Prevention

Monitor your GitHub API usage and consider implementing multiple integrations before hitting rate limits, especially if you have:

  • A large number of stacks

  • Heavy automation around PR comments and notifications

  • Frequent PR activity across multiple repositories

Feature Request

There is an open feature request to natively shard GitHub activity over multiple GitHub Apps. If this is a recurring pain point for you, consider upvoting it: Shard GitHub activity over multiple GH Apps.