Builds failing immediately on 1st action on executor

[lbrownell-gpsw]

I’ve got 3 repos that were running until recently. Now they fail in the first step that actually uses the executor with this:

failed to start cmd in pty: fork/exec /bin/sh: argument list too long
CircleCI received exit code 1

In most cases, that’s checkout – but the repo driving these has only config.yml, which is already read, so I don’t need to clone the repo, so I removed that, and the next step (adding ssh keys) failed the same way.

Two of these are are failing on MacOS/xcode 11.3.1 images, the other in an Android convenience container.

One I was actively working on. I tried re-running a prior commit that didn’t have this problem, and that re-run has the problem.

I tried re-running the others, which were working as expected and have had no further modification, and they’re failing this way too.

Thanks in advance.

[lbrownell-gpsw]

The problem was a context variable that was too big. I don’t know what the exact limit is, but suffice it to say you shouldn’t put certain MacOS provisioning profiles in a context or your build won’t get off the ground.

CircleCI devs, PMs – would be good to check for size when the user creates a context item and reject it if toooooo big.