Troubleshooting

Diagnose and fix common anodizer issues

Troubleshooting

When something goes wrong during a release, anodizer provides several flags to help you understand what happened and why.

Verbosity Flags

--quiet / -q

Suppress all non-error output. Useful in CI pipelines where you only want to see failures:

anodizer release --quiet

Only error messages will be printed to stderr. Stdout remains clean for machine-parseable output.

--verbose

Show detailed output from all stages, including:

  • External command stdout/stderr (not just on failure)
  • Template variable context before rendering
  • Environment variables passed to build commands
  • File paths being created, copied, or archived
anodizer release --verbose

--debug

Maximum detail. Includes everything from --verbose, plus:

  • Full HTTP request/response details for GitHub API calls
  • The resolved configuration after includes and overrides are merged
  • Artifact registry contents at each pipeline stage boundary
anodizer release --debug

Common Issues

Build failures

When an external command (cargo, cross, zigbuild) fails, anodizer captures and displays the full stderr output. Look for compiler errors in the output.

If you only see an exit code, run with --verbose to see the full command output:

anodizer release --verbose 2>&1 | less

Missing GitHub token

If you see an error about a missing GITHUB_TOKEN, either:

  1. Set the environment variable: export GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_...
  2. Pass it via CLI: anodizer release --token ghp_...

API errors

When a GitHub API call fails, anodizer displays the HTTP status code and response body. Common causes:

  • 401 Unauthorized: Token is invalid or expired
  • 403 Forbidden: Token lacks required permissions (needs repo scope)
  • 404 Not Found: Repository doesn't exist or token can't access it
  • 422 Unprocessable Entity: Tag already exists, or validation failed

Run with --debug to see the full HTTP request and response headers.

Config validation errors

Run anodizer check to validate your configuration without running a release:

anodizer check --verbose

This catches issues like:

  • Unknown fields (typos in config keys)
  • Invalid values (wrong type, unsupported format)
  • Circular depends_on references
  • Missing required fields

Timeout issues

The default pipeline timeout is 60 minutes. If your release consistently times out:

anodizer release --timeout 1h

Dry-run mode

Always test with --dry-run before a real release:

anodizer release --dry-run --verbose

This runs the full pipeline without creating releases, pushing tags, or publishing packages. Combined with --verbose, you can see exactly what would happen.

Getting Help

  • GitHub Issues -- report bugs or request features
  • anodizer --help -- full CLI reference
  • anodizer check -- validate your configuration