can not push site live: Unable to locate executable file: asdf

[mrjones-plip]

The last attempt to push the site live, always done through CI, failed with an error:

Cloning into '/home/runner/.asdf'...
Error: Action failed with error Error: Unable to locate executable file: asdf. Please verify either the file path exists or the file can be found within a directory specified by the PATH environment variable. Also check the file mode to verify the file is executable.

Last Fri this same step succeeded and we haven't made any changes to CI, so likely it's an upstream issue with asdf or the asdf action

[mrjones-plip]

so the command that CI is trying to run and gets the error is:

Cloning into '/home/runner/.asdf'...
/home/runner/.asdf/bin/asdf plugin-list

And indeed, when I locally run the clone and check for the bin director, it's gone:

/usr/bin/git clone --depth 1 --branch master --single-branch https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git /home/runner/.asdf

ls /home/runner/.asdf/
ballad-of-asdf.md  CONTRIBUTING.md  go.mod    internal  README.md                   SECURITY.md       tools.go
CHANGELOG.md       defaults         go.sum    LICENSE   release-please-config.json  staticcheck.conf  version.txt
cmd                docs             help.txt  Makefile  scripts                     test

/home/runner/.asdf# ls /home/runner/.asdf/bin
ls: cannot access '/home/runner/.asdf/bin': No such file or directory

What's so odd is that master branch on asdf hasn't had any changes since Nov 15, 2025, so why would it start failing now when there haven't been any recent changes 😕

I suspect a fix would be to bump to latest version of asdf , but that's very unsatisfying/unsettling to not know why/how it broke. Buuut...why is that we specify @2 in the GH action (uses: asdf-vm/actions/install@v2), but then it checks out master (--branch master) instead a specific version (--branch master)

[mrjones-plip]

Ohhhh!!!! OK - I figured out why the action broke.

This commit 4 hours ago deleted ./bin/asdf from master of asdf repo and NOT the asdf-actions repo where I was initially looking.

[mrjones-plip]

ahhhh - it's all making more and more sense. I bumped to @4 of asdf and I see they do a tightly pinned curl call to a specific version (v0.18.1) instead of a git call to master. Here's the @4 call from the CI run I just tested with:

Run asdf-vm/actions/install@v4
  with:
    asdf_version: latest
    skip_install: false
    github_token: ***
/usr/bin/curl -sSL -o /tmp/asdf-v0.18.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/releases/download/v0.18.1/asdf-v0.18.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz
/usr/bin/tar -C /home/runner/.asdf/bin -xzf /tmp/asdf-v0.18.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz
/home/runner/.asdf/bin/asdf plugin list

Created an upstream issue so folks can more easily discover what was so confusing for me

[mrjones-plip]

Filed upstream asdf issue in case anyone else gets stuck like we did.