Gathering information to troubleshoot Zowe CLI

Follow these instructions to gather specific pieces of information to help troubleshoot Zowe CLI issues.

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Identify the currently installed CLI version

Issue the following command:

zowe -V 

Zowe CLI versions may vary depending upon if the @latest or @lts-incremental version is installed.

For the @latest (forward-development) version:

npm list -g @zowe/cli

For the @lts-incremental version:

npm list -g @brightside/core

More information regarding versioning conventions for Zowe CLI and plug-ins is located in Versioning Guidelines.

Identify the currently installed versions of plug-ins

Issue the following command:

zowe plugins list

The output describes version and the registry information. Note that the offical downloads are located at https://api.bintray.com/npm

Environment variables

The following settings are configurable via environment variables:

Log levels

Environment variables are available to specify logging level and the CLI home directory.

Important! Setting the log level to TRACE or ALL might result in "sensitive" data being logged. For example, command line arguments will be logged when TRACE is set.

Environment Variable	Description	Values	Default
ZOWE_APP_LOG_LEVEL	Zowe CLI logging level	Log4JS log levels (OFF, TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL)	DEBUG
ZOWE_IMPERATIVE_LOG_LEVEL	Imperative CLI Framework logging level	Log4JS log levels (OFF, TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL)	DEBUG

Home directory

You can set the location on your computer for the Zowe CLI home directory, which contains log files, profiles, and plug-ins for the product.

Tip! The default .zowe folder is created when you issue your first Zowe CLI command. If you change the location of the folder, you must reinstall plug-ins and recreate or move profiles and log files that you want to retain. In some cases, you might want to maintain a different set of profiles in multiple folders, then switch between them using the environment variable.

Environment Variable	Description	Values	Default
ZOWE_CLI_HOME	Zowe CLI home directory location	Any valid path on your computer	C:\Users\<username>\.zowe

The values for these variables can be echoed.

Home directory structure

Location of logs

There are two sets of logs to be aware of:

• Imperative CLI Framework log, which generally contains installation and configuration information.
• Zowe CLI log, which contains information about interaction between CLI and the server endpoints.

Analyze these logs for any information relevant to your issue.

Profile configuration

The profiles folder stores connnection information.

Important! The profile directory might contain "sensitive" information, such as your mainframe password. You should obfuscate any sensitive references before providing configuration files.

Node.js and npm

Zowe CLI should be compatible with Node.js v8 and greater.

To gather Node.js and npm versions, use the following:

node --versionnpm --version

npm configuration

If you are having trouble installing Zowe CLI from an npm registry, gather your npm configuration to help identify issues with registry settings, global install paths, proxy settings, etc...

npm config ls -l

npm log files

In case of errors, npm creates log files in the npm_cache\_logs location. To get the npm_cache location for a specific OS, run the following command:

npm config get cache

By default, npm keeps only 10 log files, but sometimes more are needed. Increase the log count by issuing the following command:

npm config set logs-max 50

This command increases the log count to 50, so that more log files will be stored on the system. Now you can run tests multiple times and not lose the log files. The logs can be passed to Support for analysis.

As the log files are created only when an npm conmmand fails, but you are interested to see what is executed, you can increase the log level of npm. Issue the following command:

npm config set loglevel verbose

• With this change, you can see all actions taken by npm on the stdout. If the command is successful, it still does not generate a log file.

• The available log levels are: "silent", "error", "warn", "notice", "http", "timing", "info", "verbose", "silly", and "notice". "Notice" is the default.

• Alternatively, you can pass --loglevel verbose on the command line, but this only works with npm related commands. By setting log level in the config, it also works when you issue some zowe commands that use npm (for example, zowe plugins install @zowe/cics).