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Broken connectivity (ECONNREFUSED) on Ubuntu-latest runners following Docker v29.1 update #77

@jiyuujin

Description

@jiyuujin

Describe the bug

My CI pipeline, which has been working perfectly for a long time, suddenly started failing around the second week of February 2026. The application fails to connect to MongoDB with the following error:
Unhandled Rejection occurred: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:27017

Upon investigation, this coincides with the GitHub Actions runner update (Ubuntu 24.04 image version 20260209.x) which upgraded Docker Engine from v28 to v29.1.5.

Steps to reproduce

  • Use ubuntu-latest (currently Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS).
  • Use supercharge/mongodb-github-action@1.8.0 (or older versions).
  • Attempt to connect to MongoDB from a Node.js application.

The connection is refused because the container fails to initialize properly or bind the port under the new Docker v29.1 / containerd image store architecture.

Expected behavior

The MongoDB container should start and be accessible at 127.0.0.1:27017.

Actual behavior

The container appears to be missing or fails to start silently. Running docker ps -a shows no running containers, and the application receives ECONNREFUSED.

Environment:

  • Runner OS: Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS (ubuntu-latest)
  • Docker Engine version: 29.1.5 (Updated via GitHub on Feb 9, 2026)
  • Action version: 1.8.0

Workaround found:

I was able to resolve this by bypassing the action and starting the MongoDB container directly via the Docker CLI in my workflow:

YAML
- name: Start MongoDB (Manual)
run: docker run --name mongodb -d -p 27017:27017 mongo:6.0
This suggests that the internal wrapping logic of the action may be incompatible with the strict security profiles or the new API requirements (v1.44+) introduced in Docker v29.

Additional context

GitHub officially announced the rollout of Docker v29.1 starting February 9th, 2026.
Link to announcement: GitHub Changelog - Docker version upgrades

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