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Patroni “'int' object has no attribute 'get'” with etcd on Ubuntu 24.04

Published 27 September 2026 · 5 min read · Patroni 4.1.5, etcd 3.4.30 → 3.6.15

You installed etcd with apt, started a healthy 3-member cluster, and pointed Patroni at it. Patroni never starts PostgreSQL. It just logs the same error every five seconds. The problem is the etcd version, not your configuration.

The symptom

ERROR: Failed to get list of machines from http://127.0.0.1:2379/v3: AttributeError("'int' object has no attribute 'get'")
ERROR: Failed to get list of machines from http://127.0.0.1:2380/v3: AttributeError("'int' object has no attribute 'get'")
INFO: waiting on etcd

Meanwhile etcd itself looks perfectly healthy, which is what makes this confusing:

$ etcdctl endpoint health
127.0.0.1:2379 is healthy: successfully committed proposal: took = 2.1ms

The cause

Patroni's etcd3 backend doesn't use gRPC. It talks to etcd's JSON gateway over plain HTTP, the /v3/… endpoints. Ubuntu 24.04's etcd-server package is etcd 3.4.30. On that build, the endpoint Patroni calls first to discover cluster members doesn't answer the way Patroni expects:

$ curl -s http://127.0.0.1:2379/version
{"etcdserver":"3.4.30","etcdcluster":"3.4.0"}

$ curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:2379/v3/cluster/member/list -d '{}'
404 page not found

Patroni gets back something that isn't the JSON object it expects, fails while parsing it, and retries forever. The error names a Python type, not etcd, which sends people looking in the wrong place.

The same request against etcd 3.6 returns the member list, and Patroni bootstraps immediately. We confirmed both on the same machine while testing the Twinhull kit.

Confirm it on your system

etcd --version | head -1                 # 3.4.x → this is your problem
curl -s -X POST http://<etcd-ip>:2379/v3/cluster/member/list -d '{}' | head -c 200

If the second command prints 404 page not found instead of JSON with a members array, upgrade etcd.

The fix: install etcd 3.5 or newer from the official release

Distribution packages lag behind. Install the upstream release binaries, which are statically linked and have no dependencies (current as of September 2026: 3.6.15; check github.com/etcd-io/etcd/releases):

sudo systemctl disable --now etcd                    # stop the distro etcd
sudo apt remove -y etcd-server etcd-client

ETCD_VER=v3.6.15
curl -fsSL -o /tmp/etcd.tgz \
  https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/releases/download/$ETCD_VER/etcd-$ETCD_VER-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xzf /tmp/etcd.tgz -C /tmp
sudo install -m 755 /tmp/etcd-$ETCD_VER-linux-amd64/{etcd,etcdctl,etcdutl} /usr/local/bin/
etcd --version | head -1                             # etcd Version: 3.6.15

Then run etcd from /usr/local/bin/etcd with your own systemd unit and a config file (--config-file /etc/etcd/etcd.conf.yml).

Two more things while you're here

• Don't switch Patroni to the old etcd (v2) backend to work around this. The v2 API is deprecated, and etcd 3.6 no longer serves it.
• Use etcdctl without a proxy. If your servers export HTTPS_PROXY, add the etcd addresses to NO_PROXY, or health checks may go through the proxy and time out.