Troubleshoot and diagnose Tidal Tools problems

If you are having problems related to Tidal Tools, the following tips should help you getting things working.

Most problems with Tidal Tools can be fixed by following the troubleshooting methods described below. If you need extra help with any of this, you can reach us at support@tidalcloud.com.

General troubleshooting options

Diagnose dependencies and environment with `tidal doctor`

To work properly and to provide some of its features Tidal Tools depends on some additional software and external services. To check your environment run tidal doctor and review its output for any warnings and ways to recover.

Sample tidal doctor output looks like the following:

[-] Tidal Tools v2.2.20
    X Updates available.
      Go to https://get.tidal.sh/ for update instructions.
    • Config file in use: /home/tidaluser/.config/tidal/config.yaml
    • Logfile location: /home/tidaluser/.local/share/tidal/tidal.log

[√] Tidal API connection
    • Tidal API connection configured OK.

[√] Docker
    • Docker at /usr/bin/docker
    • Server 18.09.0 • API 1.39 (min. 1.12) • Client 1.39
    • Pull from registry OK

[-] DNS Tools
    X DNS Tools not installed.
      Go to https://dnstools.ninja/download/ for installation instructions

[-] vSphere connection
    X vSphere connection not configured.
      Run 'tidal login vsphere' to set it up.

Update Tidal Tools

Periodically Tidal Tools checks if the newer version is available. It would inform you about it as a message printed to your terminal or command prompt output after any tidal command invocation:

Looks like you are running an older version of Tidal Tools.
Check https://get.tidal.sh for update instructions!

Also you can explicitly check for new Tidal Tools versions available by running tidal check-updates or tidal doctor command.

Default log file location

To perform better diagnosis of any issues with Tidal Tools, some of the underlying activities performed by Tidal Tools are written to the log file. If you are having trouble with one of the Tidal Tools commands, you can reach us at support@tidalcloud.com and send us your log file for us to investigate.

The default locations of the log file are:

C:\Users\tidaluser\AppData\Roaming\tidal\tidal.log on Windows
/home/tidaluser/.local/share/tidal/tidal.log on Linux
/Users/tidaluser/Library/tidal/tidal.log on macOS

Please note that log files are truncated by default before the tidal invocation. That means that the default log file contains entries specific to the one particular tidal run.

How to prevent log file from truncating

The default log files truncation behavior may be not desirable in cases when it is necessary to combine log entries of the several subsequent tidal invocations. To prevent the existing log file from truncating you can utilize --keep-log command line flag. When the --keep-log flag is used the log file (default, or one specified with --log-file) won’t be truncated before the tidal command call.

Docker installation

Some of the Tidal Tools features (for example, tidal analyze code) depend on Docker to be installed. To get the Docker installation instructions please check the Docker Documentation.

How to check if Docker actually works

There are a few ways to check if your Docker installation actually works.

Open your terminal emulator or command prompt and run the command docker run hello-world. The sample output should look like the following:

Unable to find image 'hello-world:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/hello-world
d1725b59e92d: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:0add3ace90ecb4adbf7777e9aacf18357296e799f81cabc9fde470971e499788
Status: Downloaded newer image for hello-world:latest

Hello from Docker!
This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.
…

To explicitly check that your Docker installation is able to communicate with Tidal container registry run the command docker run gcr.io/tidal-1529434400027/hello-world. You should see the output similar to the following:

Unable to find image 'gcr.io/tidal-1529434400027/hello-world:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from tidal-1529434400027/hello-world
9e91b00c0251: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:b60c2de90e0b5c4f7e74b84ca888e2fec1d288d47c99e48bd612e0eefeb604c5
Status: Downloaded newer image for gcr.io/tidal-1529434400027/hello-world:latest
Hello from Tidal!

Another option is to run tidal doctor and check the Docker section of the output.

Docker networking issues

Sometimes Docker has issues with DNS and you may see an error like:

Error response from daemon: Get https://gcr.io/v2/: proxyconnect tcp: dial tcp: lookup http on 192.168.65.1:53: no such host

If so you can update the DNS server used by docker to 8.8.8.8, as Docker recommends, to solve the issue.

Specifying Docker Proxy

If you need a proxy to access the internet and see an error that looks similar this:

Error response from daemon: Get https://gcr.io/v2/: net/http: request canceled while waiting for connection (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)

You may need to configure Docker to use your proxy server. You can follow the steps that Docker provides to do that on Windows or Linux, depending on where you are running docker.

Note: If you need to authenticate with the proxy, be sure to include the username and password in the value, ie. ‘http://proxy_userid:proxy_password@proxy_ip:proxy_port’

Windows specific troubleshooting

Setting up Docker for Windows to use Linux containers

Docker for Windows supports both Linux containers and Windows containers, however Tidal Tools works when your Docker installation is set to to use Linux containers.

To check if your Docker installation was configured to use Linux containers please check one of the following:

Open Docker for Windows menu and check for the item Switch to Windows containers. If you can find it, that means that your Docker is configured to talk with Linux daemon, so no further actions are needed to be performed.
However, if you see Switch to Linux containers in the Docker for Windows menu, that means that the Docker was configured to talk to Windows daemon. You need to click that menu item to switch to Linux containers.
Running tidal doctor also checks if your Docker installation is configured to use Linux containers or not.

Issues running Tidal Tools with PowerShell ISE

Since PowerShell ISE only runs console apps that don’t require user input some of the Tidal Tools commands may work incorrect. It’s recommended to use PowerShell instead (i.e. PowerShell.exe, not PowerShell_ise.exe).

However if you really need to use PowerShell ISE you should make some preparations. Most of the time Tidal Tools ask user for some input is when it prompts for connection credentials. To prevent Tidal Tools from prompting you should explicitly specify all the necessary connection information. It could be done by either using tidal config command, or manually editing the configuration file, or by setting up the appropriate environment variables.

Windows directory separators in YAML files

Windows traditionally uses the backslash (\) to separate directories in file paths. For example, C:\Program Files\Tidal Software\tidal. However, the configuration and discovery plan language (YAML) also uses the backslash (\) as an escape character in quoted strings. This can make it awkward to write literal backslashes.

Generally it is OK to use forward slashes, because most of the time the Windows file system APIs will accept both the backslash (\) and forward-slash (/) in file paths. But when you use backslashes, you must pay extra attention to keep them from being suppressed by YAML string quoting. That means that you must escape the backslash character with another backslash (which is the escape character), so the string must be as the following: C:\\Program Files\\Tidal Software\\tidal.

Linux troubleshooting

Manage Docker as a non-root user

The Docker daemon binds to a Unix socket instead of a TCP port. By default that Unix socket is owned by the user root and other users can only access it using sudo. The Docker daemon always runs as the root user.

If you don’t want to preface the tidal analyze code command with sudo, create a Unix group called docker and add users to it. When the Docker daemon starts, it creates a Unix socket accessible by members of the docker group.

To create the docker group and add your user:

Create the docker group.
```
$ sudo groupadd docker
```
Add your user to the docker group.
```
$ sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
```
Log out and log back in so that your group membership is re-evaluated. If testing on a virtual machine, it may be necessary to restart the virtual machine for changes to take effect. On a desktop Linux environment such as X Windows, log out of your session completely and then log back in.
Verify that you can run docker commands without sudo.
```
$ docker run hello-world
```

“docker: Error response from daemon: OCI runtime create failed” error message on Fedora 31

Fedora 31 is the first major Linux dustribution that comes with cgroup v2 enabled by default. However, Docker still do not support cgroup v2.

To start Docker on Fedora 31 run the following command and reboot:

$ sudo dnf install -y grubby && \
  sudo grubby \
  --update-kernel=ALL \
  --args="systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0"

This command reverts the systemd configuration to use cgroup v1.