How can I troubleshoot a Marketplace App?

While we have a great guide to help customers Get Started with Marketplace Apps, sometimes users run into issues with these apps and may not know how to approach troubleshooting those issues. Understanding that these apps are fundamentally StackScripts that install various software on to your server can help you figure out how to troubleshoot during or after deployment.

Trouble with deployment

First, make sure you've waited enough time for the app to work through its entire StackScript after the node as fully provisioned. Most, if not all, of our app deployment guides should mention an amount of time it will take for the installation to finish. This time varies greatly. Most apps that I've deployed are between 2-15 minutes, but Kali Linux, for example, has an estimate of between 45-60 minutes. There are also factors that can delay it a bit, so consider how long it's been since your instance provisioned if you think something went wrong.

Next, the getting started guide above mentions a few ways to verify installation including following along in the LISH console or running the following command to confirm installation has completed:

grep -i 'installation complete' /var/log/stackscript.log

I wanted to mention two things about this. First, these scripts are updated as needed and it's possible an update left the line 'installation complete' out of the script. If you notice that line missing, but think your installation should be done, run the following command to see the last 10 lines of the log file.

tail /var/log/stackscript.log

If it seems like it's completed and that line is just missing, you can try to connect to your app. Feel free to open a Support Ticket to let us know and we can share that with the Marketplace Apps team.

Another possible issue during deployment is something is wrong with or has recently been changed on an upstream image that the script uses. In this post you can see an example. Our BeEF app wasn't working correctly upon deployment for a brief window because BeEF changed the version of Ruby it was using. Our app was just a bit behind. If you have trouble with an app, you may want to see if there is a public GitHub you can check to see if anything was recently changed or others are reporting issues unrelated to Linode specifically.

We've also seen customers run into DNS issues when deploying Marketplace Apps. You can read more about specific examples with Wordpress and Mastodon, but in short, you may need to use Linode's name servers as your domain's authoritative name servers for Marketplace Apps that configure a domain as part of deployment. You'll need to update these records with your registar and give records time to propagate, which you can confirm is done with DNSChecker.

Trouble after deployment

If you've been using an app for a while and run into issues that aren't covered in our other troubleshooting guides, you may want to consider the following.

First, each Marketplace app is comprised of several types of software that are installed during deployment. So looking at each individual application that was installed can help the troubleshooting process.

While generally users know what they're getting when they deploy the apps, if you're not sure, you can find a particular app's documentation to see.

For example, if you look a the Rust Game Server app, you'll see the following:

Software Included
The Rust Game Server One-Click App will install the following required software on your Linode:

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SOFTWARE | DESCRIPTION

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Rust Server | Game server

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Linux GSM | A command line tool for the deployment and management of Linux game servers.

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UFW | Firewall utility. Ports 28015 and 28016 will allow outgoing and incoming traffic.

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Fail2Ban | Fail2Ban is an intrusion prevention software framework that protects computer servers from brute-force attacks.

If you were having trouble with a server running this app, it may help to remind yourself what programs are running. You can then focus your attention on the programs most likely to be causing issues. So if this app were having issues with traffic being blocked, you may want to look into Fail2Ban first.

Once you know which apps to look at, you can check relevant logs, investigate related services, and look through forums for those applications for similar issues being reported.

Additionally, Linode does not manage software or system updates for these apps, so making sure your system and these applications are up-to-date could end up resolving some issues. Again, checking Github could be helpful here since you can usually find a changelog and it's often the first place users go to report bugs that crop up after updates.

In the end, the apps are still on servers on our infrastructure, so please let us know if there is something you think we can help with.