Fix "toomanyrequests" Pulling coolify-helper on Coolify

Error: toomanyrequests: retry-after ... pulling ghcr.io/coollabsio/coolify-helper

Coolify can't start its own helper container because pulling ghcr.io/coollabsio/coolify-helper is being rate-limited by GHCR, so deploys, backups, and update checks that depend on it fail.

Coolify pulls its own coolify-helper image from GHCR, unauthenticated, on every deploy, backup, and update check. Because most self-hosted instances run their scheduled tasks on the same default hourly cron schedule, a huge number of servers all try to pull the same image from GHCR at the same moment, colliding against GHCR's anonymous pull rate limit. When that limit is hit, the helper container never starts and whatever triggered the pull — deploy, backup, or update check — fails with toomanyrequests.

The fix

  1. Stagger your backup and scheduled-task cron times away from the top of the hour, so you're not colliding with every other instance's default schedule.

  2. Manually warm the image cache on the server so a redeploy doesn't need to re-pull it while rate-limited.

    docker pull ghcr.io/coollabsio/coolify-helper:<version>

  3. Upgrade Coolify — a partial mitigation for this shipped in v4.0.0-beta.340.

  4. If it's still persistent, authenticate Docker to GHCR to raise your rate-limit ceiling above the anonymous-pull limit.

Verify it worked

Trigger the deploy or backup outside peak minutes and confirm the helper container starts without a toomanyrequests error.

Related Coolify errors

Sources

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