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Troubleshooting Add-ons

This topic provides guidance on what to do if you encounter issues with either an individual Add-on or the Add-ons Service overall.

Unresponsive Add-ons Service

It is possible for the Add-ons Service to occasionally become unresponsive, in which case the system will respond as follows:

  • If you're a Tridion Sites Cloud customer, the system responds by loading any Extensions that were loaded previously.
  • If you're Tridion Sites on-premises customer, then by default, the service responds by killing the JVM, forcing the container to recycle.
The response behavior to an unresponsive Add-ons Service is configurable through an environment variable called addonunavailablekillservice. The default value of this property if not set is:
  • true if you're a Tridion Sites on-premises customer
  • false if you're a Tridion Sites Cloud customer

If your client is a Content Delivery microservice, you can set this environment variable using a -D switch in your microservice installation or startup script.

The effect of the value of addonunavailablekillservice is as follows:
addonunavailablekillservice has the value true
When the client-side service starts, it attempts to connect to the Add-ons Service. If it fails to do so, it removes all existing Extensions before loading.
addonunavailablekillservice has the value false
When the client-side service starts, it attempts to connect to the Add-ons Service. If it fails to do so, it loads all previously loaded Extensions.

Failed status

If one or more Extensions in your Add-on fail in one or more environments, your entire Add-on is considered to have failed and will show a Failed status.

The following are some possible reasons for an Add-on to have a Failed status:

  • The ZIP file is corrupted.
  • The manifest.json file is invalid or not well-formed.
  • The ZIP file could not be unpacked to the destination folder, because the application has no write rights to that directory.
  • At least one Extension in the Add-on failed.

Your application administrator can either fix the problems, or take the offending environment(s) offline.

If your application administrator then tells you that the Add-on is up and running again, go to your Add-on's detail screen and select Refresh above the list of Extensions.