Unable to look up github.com (port 9418) (No such host is known)

Question

I am using bower-installer to install my client-side dependencies via a custom deployment script on Azure. However, whenever bower attempts to run on Azure I get the following error

{ 
  [Error: Failed to execute "git ls-remote --tags --heads git://github.com/****.git", exit code of #128]   code: 'ECMDERR',   
  details: 'fatal: Unable to look up github.com (port 9418) (No such host is known. )\n',
  exitCode: 128, 
  ... 
}

This is failing everytime, although the repository on which it fails varies. The website was created under a standard PAYG subscription (currently under Free Trial period) but, weirdly, deploying the same site under a dev/test subscription runs absolutely fine.

I have done a bit of digging into the error itself and apparently it can be resolved by switching the protocol used by bower to access the repository by running the following command

git config --global url."https://".insteadOf git://

So, naturally I tried this and I got another error from Azure

error: could not lock config file ***/.gitconfig: Permission denied

Hit a bit of a brick wall with this now, apparently this error can be a result of port 9418 being blocked by the host, hence, switching the protocol usually resolves this as it effectively changes the port used to connect to Github. However, if that were the case sure it would also be failing on the dev/test subscription as well? (unless there are some security differences between subscription type I don't know about?)

Any Azure guys out there able to help me out with this one?

Answer 1

After a lot of investigation this turned out to be a glitch. I think what happened was Azure had gotten itself into a state to which the only resolution appeared to be deleting the website and re-creating it.