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

[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

[marcuspoehls]

@jiyuujin Hey, thank you for the very detailed issue description. That is awesome!

I’m reading that you’re using version 1.8.0 of this action. That version is not compatible with the upgraded Docker engine v29.

Please use version 1.12.1 of this MongoDB GitHub Action with Docker v29. After trying the version bump, please report back if the pipeline is working for you again.