This section guides you through submitting a bug report. Following these guidelines helps maintainers and the community understand your report, reproduce the behavior, and find related reports.

When you are creating a bug report, please include as many details as possible.

Note: If you find a Closed issue that seems like it is the same thing that you're experiencing, open a new issue and include a link to the original issue in the body of your new one.

Before Submitting A Bug Report

• Confirm the problem is reproducible in the latest version of the software
• Check Besu documentation. You might be able to find the cause of the problem and fix things yourself.
• Perform a cursory search of project issues to see if the problem has already been reported. If it has and the issue is still open, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.

How Do I Submit A (Good) Bug Report?

Bugs are tracked as issues.

Explain the problem and include additional details to help maintainers reproduce the problem:

• Use a clear and descriptive summary for the issue to identify the problem.
• Describe the exact steps which reproduce the problem in as many details as possible. For example, start by explaining how you started Besu, e.g. which command exactly you used in the terminal, or how you started it otherwise.
• Provide specific examples to demonstrate the steps. Include links to files or GitHub projects, or copy/pasteable snippets, which you use in those examples. If you're providing snippets in the issue, use backticks (```) to format the code snippets.
• Describe the behavior you observed after following the steps and point out what exactly is the problem with that behavior.
• Explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why.
• Include screenshots which show you following the described steps and clearly demonstrate the problem.

Provide more context by answering these questions:

• Did the problem start happening recently (e.g. after updating to a new version of the software) or was this always a problem?
• If the problem started happening recently, can you reproduce the problem in an older version of the software? What's the most recent version in which the problem doesn't happen?
• Can you reliably reproduce the issue? If not, provide details about how often the problem happens and under which conditions it normally happens.

Include details about your configuration and environment:

• Which version of the software are you using? You can get the exact version by running besu -v in your terminal.
• What OS & Version are you running?
  • For Linux - What kernel are you running? You can get the exact version by running uname -a in your terminal.
• Are you running in a virtual machine? If so, which VM software are you using and which operating systems and versions are used for the host and the guest?
• Are you running in a docker container? If so, what version of docker?
• Are you running in a a Cloud? If so, which one, and what type/size of VM is it?
• What version of Java are you running? You can get the exact version by looking at the besu logfile during startup.
• If you are using privacy, we request some extra information.