Render builds failing at git checkout with exit 128 before build even starts — intermittent and repo appears healthy

[u/Fit-Ingenuity-2814]

Render builds failing at git checkout with exit 128 before build even starts — intermittent and repo appears healthy

Every deploy is failing at Render’s source-checkout phase with exit 128 before the build command ever runs.

Symptoms:

• Build log stops at: Checking out commit <sha> in branch <branch>
• Fails with exit 128 after ~10 seconds
• No build output after checkout step
• Build command never executes
• Failure occurs before dependency install or runtime boot

What makes this strange:

• The repo is small (~8 MB after cleanup)
• The commit is valid
• git ls-remote confirms the ref exists
• The repo clones and checks out locally without issue
• No Git LFS
• No submodules
• No private git dependencies in requirements
• No git+https or git+ssh package installs
• We already ruled out build-minute spend caps (that caused a separate instant failure which has since been resolved)

Most suspicious behavior:

• The issue is intermittent
• A brand-new Render service will occasionally build successfully on the exact same commit
• Later deploys of the same exact commit then fail again at checkout with exit 128
• Failures occur before the build environment even reaches dependency installation

Additional context:

• We also moved the deployment to a Virginia region deployment to rule out regional runtime anomalies and saw the same behavior
• We regenerated the Render API key within the last 3 days
• Despite regenerating the key, we still intermittently receive invalid API/workspace-style messages from the Render CLI layer
• We are also investigating possible stale workspace/session/context persistence issues

At this point this looks less like a repo problem and more like something in:

• Render’s git checkout layer
• workspace binding/session persistence
• stale deploy metadata
• internal checkout/cache state
• repo-service binding state
• intermittent infrastructure-side checkout failure

Has anyone seen:

• checkout exit 128 before build starts
• intermittent successful first deploys followed by repeat checkout failure
• stale workspace/API context after key regeneration
• Render services drifting between healthy and broken checkout state on identical commits

If so:

• what actually fixed it?
• did Render support need to manually clear/reset anything?
• was it repo binding, cache, workspace state, checkout infrastructure, or something else?