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Figma API rate limiting causes export failures on large projectsΒ #263

@maroffo

Description

@maroffo

Problem

After Figma's updated rate limits went into effect on November 17, 2025, I started experiencing export failures on a large Figma project due to HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) errors.

See the official announcement and rate limits documentation.

Symptoms

  • Export fails partway through on projects with many components/assets
  • Error messages related to API failures or timeouts
  • The issue is more pronounced on larger Figma files with many icons, images, or styles

Root Cause

The current implementation does not handle:

  • HTTP 429 responses from Figma API
  • The Retry-After header that indicates how long to wait before retrying
  • Automatic retry with backoff

Proposed Solution

I've opened PR #262 that adds automatic retry with exponential backoff:

  • Handles HTTP 429 responses using the Retry-After header
  • Implements exponential backoff for request timeouts
  • Exits gracefully if wait time exceeds 5 minutes (configurable)
  • Retries up to 3 times by default (configurable)

This allows figma-export to work reliably with large Figma projects under the new rate limits.

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