Choco: [feature] display feed status and errors.

[xse]

Hi,
Right now, i can't find any packages with "choco search" on the community feed.
The chocolatey website also returns 0 results for existing packages.

It must be down or something.
The issue is, i was trying to install poshgit, i accessed the package's website page just before the whole thing went down so i had multiple results at my first search, and obviously as soon as i typed "choco install posh-git" it wasn't working. So i contacted the maintainer giving him logs and so on. About 5 minutes after that i realized that every search/install i was trying to do was failing and every search on the website too.

2018-02-19 07:25:54,235 1568 [ERROR] - posh-git not installed. The package was not found with the source(s) listed.
If you specified a particular version and are receiving this message, it is possible that the package name exists but the version does not.
Version: ""
Source(s): "https://chocolatey.org/api/v2/"

Here are the full logs : https://gist.github.com/xse/ea55fd735631b06cc28e03073d2f0a35

It would be really nice to have a "feed status" information displayed on the CLI and somewhere on the website when this happens.

Instead of "0 packages found" or the error when installing in the terminal i'd like something like "there is an issue with the feed...". I feel dumb for having reported the issue to the maintainer now :/

By the way is this a common thing ? It's been more than 45 minutes, i mean this is the main public feed.

Thanks

[bcurran3]

I've never seen this happen before (but that doesn't say much).

I've e-mailed Rob and Gary. Rob is probably snoring right now. Gary is probably waking up.

[gep13]

@xse said...
By the way is this a common thing ? It's been more than 45 minutes, i mean this is the main public feed.

No, it isn't very common for this sort of thing to happen.

[gep13]

@bcurran3 said...
Gary is probably waking up.

I am awake, I will try to see what is going on, but I may need to wait for @ferventcoder's input.

[xse]

@gep13 said...
No, it isn't very common for this sort of thing to happen.

Good to know !

I'm totally new to both windows and chocolatey, coming from a linux/bsd background i really wasn't expecting a package manager to fail.

I might suggest some sort of repository mirrors for data redundancy, with PGP signed official packages for security ( allows anyone to mirror the public feed but assure that the downloaded package is secure ) to ensure this doesn't happens again.
Although i totally understand that it wouldn't be that easy to implement.

Anyway, good luck looking into that !

[bcurran3]

Looks like things are working again. Yeah Gary!

[gep13]

@bcurran3 said...
Looks like things are working again. Yeah Gary!

I would like to say that I did something to fix it, but unfortunately, I didn't 😢

[gep13]

@xse said...
with PGP signed official packages for security

Signing of packages is definitely something that we are thinking about.

So that we are clear, are you saying that the installation of the chocolatey package wasn't working, or simply that the search results wasn't returning anything? I know that these two things are closely related, but I just want to know where the problem was occurring.

[xse]

At one point i though both, but now i realized that it must have only been the search results that wasn't working, in the website and also with "choco search", that confused me.

Also, no idea if that's related but when this was occurring the main page "https://chocolatey.org/packages" without filters was actually showing only one package, i can't remember which one it was but still i don't see why only one would appears.

[gep13]

I think all of these things could be related. We do some pretty aggressive caching on the website do to the high volume of traffic that we get, and as a result, we do sometimes see issues similar to what you have described above.

[xse]

Hi,
Just wanted to update you I think it's happening again.
I have a few results on the website only when using "Sort by A-Z" but 0 results on any search either in the cli or the website.
However last time i didn't had that much results on the A-Z page it only had one packet.

EDIT : seems back up, i'm able to search for f.lux on the website there is something strange tho.
I'm able to now search for other softwares in CLI with good results, but not f.lux, might be a local cache related thingy.

[ferventcoder]

@xse when you are seeing this on the site, scroll to the bottom and see which server it is ("web.2", etc). It's in tiny print at the bottom of the page.

[xse]

Alright !
Yeah it seems like it's related to that.
I quickly made a dirty bash script running on the bash shell included with git on windows, it'll check for errors on website and cli every 5 minutes, maybe there is a specific pattern to look for.

Seems like web.2 gave me 0 results for f.lux at UTC:2018-02-21_17:53:40
But web.1 results were correct.

[ferventcoder]

@xse interesting. :D

So we just did some maintenance with the site to alleviate issues (earlier today)

[xse]

Hi !
A little update after having that script run for a little bit less than 48 hours on the packages : "f.lux", "firefox" and "choco".

From UTC:2018-02-21_19:16:56 to UTC:2018-02-23_16:39:47 :

• 93 website errors ( web1 : 6, web.2 : 59, web.3 : 28 ).
• 69 cli errors.

So nearly all errors appeared the 02-22, only two errors so far today (02-23) and 0 error the 02-21.

Something i noticed is that i had a bunch of cli errors relative to "firefox" occurred next to each others, just like i reported earlier it might be a local cache thingy i don't really know, because those were only relative to firefox and the other softwares were found. Very similar to what i had earlier this week with the cli search for "f.lux" that wasn't giving me any results but all the others search were correct.

Something strange i noticed was 9 parsing errors from bash ( maybe the website wasn't replying, maybe my internet connection failed, i really doubt it is a regex issue ).

Another strange output i got was :

log4net:ERROR RollingFileAppender: INTERNAL ERROR. Append is False but OutputFile [C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\logs\chocolatey.log] already exists.
or
log4net:ERROR RollingFileAppender: INTERNAL ERROR. Append is False but OutputFile [C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\logs\choco.summary.log] already exists.

Even if this has certainly nothing to do with the package search issue, i feel like it's still interesting to mention it, from what i saw it might be a permission issue ( i was running the search from a non administrator account ), but what's strange is that i only had those lines 3 times, i feel like either it must have been every time or never. ( the cli search was launched with only "--trace", i didn't use "--debug" ).

Here is the full cli output so far.

Anyway i might let it running for a few days, i feel like it's pretty strange that the errors nearly all happened the same day.

Have a good day !

[jayvdb]

Is this still happening? Or is it resolved?