How to debug Incus¶

For information on debugging instance issues, see How to troubleshoot failing instances.

Debugging `incus` and `incusd`¶

Here are different ways to help troubleshooting incus and incusd code.

`incus --debug`¶

Adding --debug flag to any client command will give extra information about internals. If there is no useful info, it can be added with the logging call:

logger.Debugf("Hello: %s", "Debug")

`incus monitor`¶

This command will monitor messages as they appear on remote server.

REST API through local socket¶

On server side the most easy way is to communicate with Incus through local socket. This command accesses GET /1.0 and formats JSON into human readable form using jq utility:

curl --unix-socket /var/lib/incus/unix.socket incus/1.0 | jq .

See the RESTful API for available API.

REST API through HTTPS¶

HTTPS connection to Incus requires valid client certificate that is generated on first incus remote add. This certificate should be passed to connection tools for authentication and encryption.

If desired, openssl can be used to examine the certificate (~/.config/incus/client.crt):

openssl x509 -text -noout -in client.crt

Among the lines you should see:

Certificate purposes:
SSL client : Yes

With command line tools¶

wget --no-check-certificate --certificate=$HOME/.config/incus/client.crt --private-key=$HOME/.config/incus/client.key -qO - https://127.0.0.1:8443/1.0

With browser¶

Some browser plugins provide convenient interface to create, modify and replay web requests. To authenticate against Incus server, convert incus client certificate into importable format and import it into browser.

For example this produces client.pfx in Windows-compatible format:

openssl pkcs12 -clcerts -inkey client.key -in client.crt -export -out client.pfx

After that, opening https://127.0.0.1:8443/1.0 should work as expected.

Debug the Incus database¶

The files of the global database are stored under the ./database/global sub-directory of your Incus data directory (/var/lib/incus/database/global).

Since each member of the cluster also needs to keep some data which is specific to that member, Incus also uses a plain SQLite database (the “local” database), which you can find in ./database/local.db.

Backups of the global database directory and of the local database file are made before upgrades, and are tagged with the .bak suffix. You can use those if you need to revert the state as it was before the upgrade.

Dumping the database content or schema¶

If you want to get a SQL text dump of the content or the schema of the databases, use the incus admin sql <local|global> [.dump|.schema] command, which produces the equivalent output of the .dump or .schema directives of the sqlite3 command line tool.

Running custom queries from the console¶

If you need to perform SQL queries (e.g. SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE) against the local or global database, you can use the incus admin sql command (run incus admin sql --help for details).

You should only need to do that in order to recover from broken updates or bugs. Please consult the Incus team first (creating a GitHub issue or forum post).

Running custom queries at Incus daemon startup¶

In case the Incus daemon fails to start after an upgrade because of SQL data migration bugs or similar problems, it’s possible to recover the situation by creating .sql files containing queries that repair the broken update.

To perform repairs against the local database, write a ./database/patch.local.sql file containing the relevant queries, and similarly a ./database/patch.global.sql for global database repairs.

Those files will be loaded very early in the daemon startup sequence and deleted if the queries were successful (if they fail, no state will change as they are run in a SQL transaction).

As above, please consult the Incus team first.

Syncing the cluster database to disk¶

If you want to flush the content of the cluster database to disk, use the incus admin sql global .sync command, that will write a plain SQLite database file into ./database/global/db.bin, which you can then inspect with the sqlite3 command line tool.