[Bug]: Frigate fails to start, likely due to failing version check

[jeffstearns]

Checklist

• I have updated to the latest available Frigate version.
• I have cleared the cache of my browser.
• I have tried a different browser to see if it is related to my browser.
• I have tried reproducing the issue in incognito mode to rule out problems with any third party extensions or plugins I have installed.
• I have asked the AI at https://docs.frigate.video about my issue.

Describe the problem you are having

Frigate fails to start properly, likely due to a failing version check.

The log suggests that Frigate failed while attempting to check the version number.

The log messages actually suggest two problems:

1. Frigate exception handling has a bug that raises an exception-within-an-exception.
2. Frigate fails to start properly if its version check fails.

The JSON decoding error is not due to a corrupt .json file. I have no .json files within /opt/frigate/config. I don't use semantic search.
My Internet connection was up and working during the time that Frigate failed.

Steps to reproduce

1. Navigate to a Frigate instance which is known to run correctly.
2. Press the "Restart Frigate" button.
3. Wait 120 seconds for Frigate to restart.
4. Note that Frigate restarted partially but not completely. Specifically, port 5000 will serve static content, but not dynamic content. All browser requests for dynamic content fail with error 500 (Gateway down).
5. Wait for 30 more minutes.
6. Note that the problem persists.
7. Since I can't view the Frigate log in a browser, I used journalctl to extract the relevant system log messages. They are included below.
8. Note that the log messages show that Frigate took an exception within the JSON decoder at startup.
9. While handling this exception, Frigate took an exception-within-an-exception. This may be significant.
10. Manually reboot the host. The same problem persists. Repeat as desired.

At this point, I stopped fiddling with Frigate. After 11 hours, Frigate restarted for unknown reasons. After this restart, Frigate operated normally.

Version

0.16.2-4d58206

In which browser(s) are you experiencing the issue with?

No response

Frigate config file

I can post it here, but I really don't think it's relevant to this case.  This configuration normally works just fine, and has done so for months.  The problem isn't correlated with a config file change.

docker-compose file or Docker CLI command

# This is used by docker-compose to create a Docker container containing Frigate.

#name: frigate
services:
  frigate:
    container_name: frigate
    privileged: true
    restart: unless-stopped
    image: ghcr.io/blakeblackshear/frigate:stable
    ### 2024-05-27 jps: We need at least 300M of shm for our 11 cameras
    shm_size: "512mb" # update for your cameras based on calculation at https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/installation/
    devices:
      - /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb # Passes the USB Coral, needs to be modified for other versions
      - /dev/dri/renderD128 # For intel hwaccel, needs to be updated for specific hardware
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /opt/frigate/config:/config  # N.B. The web page adds ":ro" here but that causes Frigate failure "Read-only file system: '/config/model_cache'"
      - /clips:/media/frigate
      - type: tmpfs # Optional: 1GB of memory, reduces SSD/SD Card wear
        target: /tmp/cache
        tmpfs:
          size: 1000000000
    ports:
      - "1984:1984" # HTTP UI for gotortc.  Insecure, so don't expose to the world.  Some folks report the gotortc web UI not working.
      - "5000:5000" # Unauthenticated UI access for use on internal net (including Home Assistant). Expose carefully.
      - "8971:8971" # Authenticated UI and API access without TLS.  Relatively safe to expose this to outside world, so reverse proxies should use this port.
      - "8554:8554" # RTSP restreaming. By default, these streams are unauthenticated. Authentication can be configured in go2rtc section of config.
      - "8555:8555/tcp" # WebRTC over TCP for low latency live views.
      - "8555:8555/udp" # WebRTC over UDP for low latency live views.

Relevant Frigate log output

Frigate isn't working, so it can't serve its log messages.  Thus this output is taken from journalctl:
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.704757418  Traceback (most recent call last):
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.704760544    File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/dist-packages/requests/models.py", line 976, in json
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.704999935      return complexjson.loads(self.text, **kwargs)
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705059066             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705066958    File "/usr/lib/python3.11/json/__init__.py", line 346, in loads
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705212926      return _default_decoder.decode(s)
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705261007             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705262348    File "/usr/lib/python3.11/json/decoder.py", line 337, in decode
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705358773      obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705435018                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705436606    File "/usr/lib/python3.11/json/decoder.py", line 355, in raw_decode
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705534533      raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705572512  json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705573381  
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705574391  During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705577222  
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705578026  Traceback (most recent call last):
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705579675    File "<frozen runpy>", line 198, in _run_module_as_main
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705580763    File "<frozen runpy>", line 88, in _run_code
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705608369    File "/opt/frigate/frigate/__main__.py", line 108, in <module>
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705712690      main()
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705714345    File "/opt/frigate/frigate/__main__.py", line 104, in main
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705793443      FrigateApp(config).start()
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705794732    File "/opt/frigate/frigate/app.py", line 663, in start
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705925666      self.start_stats_emitter()
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.705977005    File "/opt/frigate/frigate/app.py", line 534, in start_stats_emitter
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706037862      stats_init(
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706039295    File "/opt/frigate/frigate/stats/util.py", line 66, in stats_init
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706108089      "latest_frigate_version": get_latest_version(config),
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706152057                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706158887    File "/opt/frigate/frigate/stats/util.py", line 46, in get_latest_version
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706222593      response = request.json()
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706262347                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706263682    File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/dist-packages/requests/models.py", line 980, in json
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706418358      raise RequestsJSONDecodeError(e.msg, e.doc, e.pos)
Jan 09 21:30:03 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:30:03.706474538  requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Following this is a very long series of error messages:

Jan 09 21:38:37 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:38:37.069442718  2026/01/09 21:38:37 [error] 180#180: *563 connect() failed (111: Connection refused) while connecting to ups
tream, client: 10.5.3.40, server: , request: "GET /api/stats HTTP/1.1", subrequest: "/auth", upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:5001/auth", host: "10.5.3.42:5000"
Jan 09 21:38:37 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:38:37.069448317  2026/01/09 21:38:37 [error] 180#180: *563 auth request unexpected status: 502 while sending to client, clien
t: 10.5.3.40, server: , request: "GET /api/stats HTTP/1.1", host: "10.5.3.42:5000"
Jan 09 21:38:42 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:38:42.067606764  2026/01/09 21:38:42 [error] 180#180: *565 connect() failed (111: Connection refused) while connecting to ups
tream, client: 10.5.3.40, server: , request: "GET /api/stats HTTP/1.1", subrequest: "/auth", upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:5001/auth", host: "10.5.3.42:5000"
Jan 09 21:38:42 frigate 4270a8531668[150]: 2026-01-09 21:38:42.067631197  2026/01/09 21:38:42 [error] 180#180: *565 auth request unexpected status: 502 while sending to client, clien
t: 10.5.3.40, server: , request: "GET /api/stats HTTP/1.1", host: "10.5.3.42:5000"

Relevant go2rtc log output

N/A

Operating system

Home Assistant OS

Install method

Docker Compose

Network connection

Wired

Camera make and model

Many Amcrest

Screenshots of the Frigate UI's System metrics pages

Not available

Any other information that may be helpful

This Frigate installation normally works reliably. The problem occurred during a specific window of time, which makes me suspect that it's dependent on something external like version number checking.

[inkeep-ai-assistant[bot]]

Based on the error logs, you're experiencing a startup failure caused by a JSON decoding error during Frigate's version check. The stack trace shows:

File "/opt/frigate/frigate/stats/util.py", line 46, in get_latest_version
  response = request.json()
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

This indicates that when Frigate attempted to check for the latest version at startup, it received an invalid or empty response that couldn't be parsed as JSON. This could happen if:

1. The GitHub API (or wherever Frigate checks for version info) was temporarily unavailable or returned an error page
2. A network issue prevented the request from completing properly
3. Rate limiting or other API restrictions blocked the request

The fact that Frigate eventually started working after 11 hours suggests this was a temporary external issue rather than a configuration problem.

Regarding the exception-within-an-exception: You're correct that there appears to be inadequate error handling. The version check failure causes Frigate to crash during startup rather than gracefully degrading or retrying.

Workaround: If this happens again, instead of waiting or repeatedly rebooting, you could try restarting just the Docker container:

docker restart frigate

This is less disruptive than a full host reboot and may resolve the issue if the external service becomes available again.

Unfortunately, I don't have specific documentation about configuration options to disable the version check or make it non-blocking during startup. You may want to report this as a bug on the Frigate GitHub repository, as startup shouldn't fail completely due to an external version check.

---

Have another question? Just tag @inkeep.

[NickM-27]

This has been fixed in 0.17