My Terraform Cloud account seems to be broken. On the workspace page it says:
Error: failed to retrieve configuration
Retrieving the configuration version failed with the error: Timed out while fetching the configuration version..
The following steps may help resolve the issue:
Check your version control provider for downtime or connectivity issues.
Check your version control provider settings or workspace settings to make sure the connection details are accurate.
Push a change to your repository to trigger a new run.
I tried what it recommends, but it didn’t help. I tried deleting and adding my Github VCS provider, but that didn’t help either.
I haven’t migrated to the new “Free Edition” yet if that matters.
Any suggestions would be great.
Hi @jbanton,
This particular error gets triggered when at least 15 minutes have elapsed since a configuration version entered the “fetching” state, but unfortunately I can’t really infer anything else from what you’ve been able to see here.
The worker that would have been running during this “fetching” state is the one responsible for contacting your VCS provider and retrieving the content of the designated repository for Terraform Cloud to use in subsequent work.
Aside from connectivity problems as the error message suggests, another possible cause I can imagine is if the repository in question were particularly large and thus were to take an unusually long time to clone.
Unfortunately this sort of problem is difficult to answer in the community forum. I assume from your mention of “free edition” that you aren’t using a subscription tier that includes dedicated customer support, which is unfortunately what I would’ve recommended as a next step, since the support team has access to diagnostic information that I cannot access. I’m afraid I’m not sure what else to suggest. 
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Today I ran some plans locally and pushed changes to my VCS and it looks like it kicked it into gear. I also migrated to the new plan, so it’s hard to know which action fixed it. But it seems to be in a working state now.
This is the first result for this error when I search on Google, so I thought I would add that this was caused in my case by a “bad” (i.e. expired) SSH key that was being used to attempt to clone sub-modules in the terraform github repository and failing. It is a non-obvious source of such an error and took a while to track down. It would be great if Terraform Cloud could surface a more helpful error instead…
The behaviour was that a plan would work from the CLI (where it uses your local repo, with the sub-modules already cloned), but then fail from the UI or from a VCS initiated run with the “failed to retrieve configuration” error. Once the SSH key in question was regenerated and updated in the workspace config, I refreshed the VCS config and it triggered a run (for an empty commit) without issues