Don't stop thinking - be smart!

[hohwille]

Automation is cool and key! However, we observe that with automations a lot of users stop thinking:
If something does not work and you get an error, then IDEasy must be the problem and source of all evil, doesn't it?
Surely we are trying our best to make your life easy and to avoid and fix bugs and increase user experience.

But if something does not work as expected before you ask for support or reports bugs, please consider:

• The first thing to do is enable more verbose logging (add --debug or --trace option immediately after ide command as ide --debug «my-args») and have a look what is going on in detail.
• IDEasy is just an automation tool that runs commands for you. You can run the command manually and see if you get the same error. To get details about executed commands run it in debug mode (see above). Already by trying to run the command manually, you might be able to understand what went wrong and may be able to fix the problem yourself.
• For arbitrary commands ide just delegates to the actual tool. So e.g. if you run ide mvn foo bar this will more or less just call mvn foo bar and if that is not working it may be because foo bar are invalid arguments for maven (mvn). In such case do your homework instead of blaming IDEasy or the according tool (Maven in this example).
• In case the command executed by IDEasy is also failing when called manually by you then do not blame IDEasy if the command itself is correct but something is wrong with the called tool or with your environment.
• There might be problems with your environment causing errors.
  • You may have network issues on your end (very common case of download issues): are you online (run ide status)? Otherwise you may be offline, your internet connection may be unstable, you may be behind a HTTP proxy, etc. In any such case fix Internet connectivity yourself and do not bother us with your personal problems.
  • You may be out of disc-space, have lack of permissions, etc. In such case be smart: analyse and fix the problems yourself but do not report no space left on device or permission denied errors to us.
  • If your project is configured to clone private git repos and that fails, check manually that you can clone. If you lack credentials or permissions there is pretty much nothing we can do about it so do not waste our time with it.
  • Your environment variables may be messed up. E.g. if your PATH variable is empty or otherwise broken, then this will cause errors and that has nothing to do with IDEasy.
  • Your configuration may be incorrect or broken. Check your settings and variables (run ide -d env).
  • etc.
• We are not responsible for your compile, build and test errors ;)
• Read the documentation and our FAQs. E.g. you should not create a feature request for a feature that is already implemented and documented but you did not take time to search for it.

Still we welcome your feedback, questions, bug reports or even contributions.
If you reached this point we are already very happy and confident that you care.
So if you spend some minutes of thinking and analysis before you ask for support you make us very happy.
We are still here to help and support you and there are situations where it may not be too easy to tell if the error is on your end or a bug in IDEasy.
So after you have done your basic homework, do not hesitate to ask your question or file your bug issue.

Also consider reading asking smart questions (see also here) before asking questions here or creating issues. We need details to understand your problem and we do not want to know your credentials, project details or other sensitive information.