helm: Release failure or error logs

helm status only shows that the release is failed, not quite useful for debugging. helm install will print the log at the time you run it, but in our environment, upgrading Helm releases are triggered by background jobs. So it would be more useful to have helm status or helm history to return the cause of failure whenever we need to debug.

+1. Because Helm is in charge of upgrades, it should collect everything relevant to the upgrade process.

Actually, if you run helm history <release> -o yaml you get full error message without ellipsis.

You can also run helm history RELEASE --col-width=0 to get the full un-buffered output IIRC.

I think we can consider this closed since the original request for non-ellipsized error messages have been documented. Please let me know if there’s something else in this ticket that we need to address and we can re-open this. Thanks!

😞

❯ helm history gloo --debug -o yaml
- app_version: ""
  chart: gloo-ee-1.0.0
  description: 'Release "gloo" failed: timed out waiting for the condition'
  revision: 1
  status: failed
  updated: "2022-08-09T11:46:50.890958+01:00"

Not so helpful. Installation via Terraform 😦

+1 At least a non-ellipsized error message would help.

@tcr-ableton you should find that:

helm history --col-width=0 RELEASE works (note the order of arguments)

Using Helm 3.5.3. --debug flag is the solution in my case.

helm history <release-name> -n <namespace> --debug

I also had @tcr-ableton 's issue with truncated output:

$ helm history --col-width=0 rabbitmq-ha
Upgrade "rabbitmq-ha" failed: v1.StatefulSet.Spec: v1.StatefulSetSpec.Template: v1.PodTemplateSpec.Spec: v1.
PodSpec.Containers: []v1.Container: v1.Container.Env: []v1.EnvVar: v1.EnvVar.v1.EnvVar.Value: Name: ReadString: expects " or n, but found 0, error found in #10 byte of ...|,{"name":0,"value":"|..., bigger context
 ...|gement-password","name":"rabbitmq-ha"}}},{"name":0,"value":"map[name:RABBIT_MANAGEMENT_USER valueFro|...

using these versions:

$ helm --tiller-namespace helm version
Client: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.16.1", GitCommit:"bbdfe5e7803a12bbdf97e94cd847859890cf4050", GitTreeState:"clean"}
Server: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.16.1", GitCommit:"bbdfe5e7803a12bbdf97e94cd847859890cf4050", GitTreeState:"clean"}

One thing I did find helpful though was to run the install/upgrade with --debug --dry-run flags. Once I could see the template that was rendered, it was obvious what the error was. I was using a chart from a remote repo, so I couldn’t use helm template

The specific issue with the ellipsis (...) though remains

I don’t know you folks, but even with helm history RELEASE --col-width=0, my output is still truncated. It looks like a pretty big output indeed, but still, part of the context is truncated to .... Is there a way to go around that: that makes the description absolutely unusable to me at the moment. It feels a bit like a guessing game 👯‍♂

@tommysitu Helm doesn’t provide the logs for you. You have to debug it using kubectl logs if you’d like to see the logs. There is some work to stream back logs with Helm, but it is only for hooks (see #2342). Does that answer your question?