Positron Pro Troubleshooting

Workbench | Preview

If you experience issues related to running Positron Pro sessions, you can use the Launcher verification tool which will attempt to launch Positron Pro sessions and provide diagnostic output about what could be going wrong. For more information, see the Troubleshooting section for the Job Launcher integration documentation.

When the Positron Pro session is starting, but not operating properly or efficiently, session diagnostics for an individual user’s session can be helpful for isolating the problem and communicating with Posit Support. The diagnostics include debug logging for the session, environment variables and command line arguments used for starting the session, and optionally may include system call tracing using the linux utility strace.

To enable diagnostics for a given session user, in the user’s home directory, create a text file with the path: ~/.config/pwb/positron-diagnostics and put either the word ‘debug’ or ‘strace’ in the file. For example, run these commands to enable strace diagnostics for the current user:

mkdir -p ~/.config/pwb
echo "strace" > ~/.config/pwb/positron-diagnostics

The next Positron Pro session started by that user starts PWB Code Server with debug logging enabled and collects additional diagnostic logs. Review the session’s output from the Posit Workbench homepage by clicking on the session’s Info > Details pane for the debug logging.

Additional diagnostics logs are collected in the directory: ~/.local/share/pwb/log:

Back to top