Does anyone know how to solve the "publishing failed" error?

I’m getting the same error. Watching this question to see if a solution comes through.

From the few information that I could have on this recurring problem, we retain that the error is generally related to a corrupted component (it may contain a ghost layer, a union that contains nothing, …). The solution for some has been to remove components-to-sync from library one by one and try to publish each time to determine the infection. It’s a process that can be really painful if there are a lot of components.

So a simple way would be to contact customer support ⇢ support@figma.com

I tried publishing today and it worked. I have no idea what changed. I was trying to do the troubleshooting according to the instructions support gave me, and then it just published without problems.

This is one of those issues that seems to be coming up a lot, but there is no solid solution (that I have found). In my case it’s def holding up progress across our entire organization.

Here’s my current “publishing failed” details:

• File will not publish
• This has happened before and the next morning everything was working fine
• Though there are some performance issues with our library file, the publishing issue is the only one that one we cannot easily work around (l’ll be honest here - if you’ve been a system designer for a while, you know it’s often a matter of ‘managing’ performance rather than ‘dealing with issues’, but this bug seems in a league of it’s own).
• I def tried publishing on different machines
• I contacted Figma directly when this happened the first time (and again today) and their previous response was to point me to the ‘best practices,’ and mentioned that not following them could lead to performance issues. I’ll be honest, when this many people have that issue, there should be something more (that perhaps I couldn’t find) that directly connects the issue with the solution (even if it is working around a bug). Having said that, I let it go as ‘it fixed itself’ the first time the issue came up.
  *I’ll update when the next figma response comes in (usually 24 hrs)
  *some of the message boards suggest this error can be due to a ‘corrupted component’
  *I definitely love all that Figma does, but this is the first time that Figma has been a major blocker (velocity / reliability / OKR) in my years using it.

Getting this problem today. Just added a component to a library I’ve been using with no problems. What a helpless feeling. I guess this library is toast now? Is there any kind of error log I can be looking at?

This library is tiny, by the way, but I use it in dozens of files.

Just getting it myself today for the first time. Since I’ve only made a few changes to the library in the past day, there weren’t that many boxes to un-tick to try to figure out which component is causing the problem… except that didn’t change anything. Maybe it’s every component I’m trying to publish? Yes, this is a major velocity blocker!

AND… two hours later I was just able to publish. Without having changed anything. Think it might have been a bug they fixed? (btw, this is all in the app. Next time I’ll try browser too).

Also got this using the Mac App. I switched to the browser (chrome) and tried it there and it was able to publish it there.

You need to close open tabs linked to other accounts. Something causing conflict happens, if projects from different accounts are open on your tabs.

Had this problem today. I think it happened when I opened another Figma account in a separate tab of the Figma desktop app for macOS Catalina.

I logged into Figma.com with the Design System account and I was able to publish the library update without incident.

The error appeared after I rearranged the order of my tab variants. It may have potentially occurred when I rebuilt my selection control components.

I encountered this problem multiple times now on the desktop app and usually solved it by just waiting and trying again the next day. However, today after some trial and error I found a rather easy fix. I can’t confirm if this works for everyone but here’s what I did:

I simply opened another instance of figma, this time I used the web app and tried to publish there. It worked like a charm and afterwards I had no trouble publishing changes on the desktop app either.

Update: It seems this also happens when I am logged in my work and private account at the same time and can be solved by just switching profile

I’ve run into this error as well. I spent a lot of time crafting a complex variant. Once it failed I assumed that I hit some sort of limit with over 200 variations so I made a compromise and reduced my variants to 160. I’ve tried publishing both on the desktop and browser and I waited a day. Nothing is working. Please help Figma!

I think this may be related to the issue. I was trying to publish a component to a work library and kept getting the error. After reading this post, I checked to see which account I was actively using. I was using my personal account. Once I flipped over to my work account, the component published with no issue.

This worked for me. Thanks Andre

Original Bug Report

Hello there, we are tried to publish Figma Libraries, it becomes our design process bottleneck, publishing especially 100+ components takes forever.
We want to keep our variants, styles, etc., and don’t want to reduce our library just to make Figma App happy, it shouldn’t be an accepted suggestion ever (like before). We are as a team, need to decide either to ditch Figma find something else(which we don’t want, we may have to), or create a design system without team libraries. Is there a timeline for these kinds of improvements?
One side note, maybe this can help fix the issue. We are sometimes tracking Figma network usage, normally Figma uses very little data. But when we publish 100+ components (this is a real use case, happens when we mistakenly give the wrong color to primitives like icons) it just hogs up 100+mb upload data.
Figma should be able to get the same data from the cloud because everything should be already synced. This thing only can make everything faster by 10x probably even faster.
Right now(at least 15min passed), the whole team is waiting for me to publish the library because I changed the colors of some icons, but those icons are used in 100 components. This should be very fast and very easy, like any other Figma features, but this is not usable, please guide us on how can we ease this process.

Same here, mostly works for small updates though (but even those can fail sometimes).

Very unreliable when you need to publish big changes. (like you change the icon color, an icon used in button, the button used in cards, etc. so the update becomes much larger).

I contacted Figma offers nothing for our design system besides performance optimizations.

BIG BUT, I noticed that publishing is using way too much network (upload). (You can see yourself on Activity Monitor on macOS) The other day I was trying to publish 130 components (as mentioned before I only change some icons colors), it uses 256MB of upload and failed after 15+ mins, weirdly when I go my coworker’s computer, it looked liked it published successfully.

Dear Figma,
I’m counting on you 🥲
THIS NEED TO BE FIXED ASAP,
Don’t use my network that much,
Show a freaking progress bar,
just publish one by one (or in batches), just don’t wait for the full update.

Thank you thank you thank you!!! I was having this problem YET AGAIN today, but after reading your comment I realised that I was indeed signed into a different account than the one that owns the offending library file.
As a freelancer, I often have a few accounts running at the same time and can switch back and forth between working on different projects during the course of the day. Figma, if you’re listening, solving this problem could be a big help to people like me!

Mirren is right! That is exactly the problem I was having. I have a couple of Figma accounts and you need to make sure that you are switched to the right account for editor permissions on the library for it to sync. I was getting so frustrated and looking for corruptions in the design system. But turns out it was just me being stupid!

Would be good if Figma prompted you to this and told you to switch accounts when this was the issue. Very easy thing to accidentally do!

Publishing via Chrome browser instead of the Mac app solves it every time for me.

Wish I knew the cause of it though. Sometimes it works in the Mac app, sometimes it doesn’t. Going to Chrome and publishing there fixes it for me.

I can confirm that this worked for me.

Previously I had given up trying, and the next day it was all fine. But today I needed the library to be published and Chrome came through.

For me a particular variant that I changed in a component seemed to be the cause of the issue…

MY CASE:
Cause: Editing and replacing a variant
Steps that solved it for me:

1. I decoupled the variants by dragging them out of the ‘variants frame’,
2. Published the library with those components (that were variants before), then
3. I selected those components again and made them variants,
4. After this I was able to publish the library without issues!

This was a micro library with just a couple of components and just 2-level nesting (variant of tabs in a header in a template), just fyi.

I was able to fix the problem with Muhammad’s solve!

My version of the solve:

1. select all variants inside a component
2. drag them outside of the component so they become individual components
3. combine all as variants (again)
4. rename the properties (because you’ll lose them when you do this)
5. republish

Thank you!!! This worked for me. This was driving me crazy. Zac’s steps above are a life saver.

Happened to me for the first time today and the reason was because I was connected to the wrong account on my list (I regularly switch between my business and private account). When I switched back to my other account it worked fine 👌
Took me a while to realise it tho 😅

awesome this works!

This was the issue for me too 😅 Thanks!

We have noticed this was a memory issue, we got it to work by splitting out our library and publishing it solved the issue as the original file was too big to publish.