Troubleshooting
Sometimes things break in strange and confusing ways, and there are a few basic approaches to resolving these issues. Viewing recent OpenShot Cloud API log files can often reveal the nature of the problem, whether it be a system issue or a simple user issue (i.e. passing incorrect JSON, a missing argument, etc…).
Log Files
If you encounter an error, the following log files can be very helpful in identifying what is breaking:
/var/log/openshot-cloud/*.log and /var/log/apache2/error.log. To quickly view the most recent logs,
use the following command:
$ tail -n 100 /var/log/openshot-cloud/*.log
$ tail -n 100 /var/log/apache2/error.log
Pending Exports
If you are seeing exports remain in the pending status, this is likely an issue with your SQS configuration. SQS is used to queue up a message for each pending export, and then a worker instance will consume that message and complete the export. If you have multiple server instances (which is not typically recommended), it is important that they each have their own unique SQS queue name. This prevents workers from an unrelated server grabbing the wrong message, and failing to export that video.
It could also indicate a problem with the worker instance failing to connect to SQS (i.e. never receiving the message), or a worker using the wrong cloud credentials (server IP, server user, server password). So, even if the worker can successfully consume the SQS message, it could fail when connecting to the server (for downloading server files, accessing server data, etc…).
To summarize, each server needs a unique SQS queue name, and workers need to use the same server credentials (user/pass) for a successful video export to happen.
Restart Services
There are many different components which make up OpenShot Cloud API, and they communicate primarily via HTTP and SQS. If these components become unable to connect to each other, you can restart the OpenShot Cloud API services (the following commands will restart all services used by OpenShot Cloud API).
$ sudo supervisorctl restart all
$ sudo service apache2 restart
Memory / Hard Drive
A very common issue is simply running out of memory during exporting/rendering, or running out of hard drive space. If you start running into strange errors, be sure to verify the server instance still has plenty of available RAM and the hard drive is not full. If possible, try and delete each project after you have exported the video. Deleting a project also removes any files associated with it, thus freeing up disk space.
Still Need Help?
If the above steps do not resolve your issues, please be sure to contact Support. We are always happy to help!