Debugging tips and tricks

While working with the Go Client libraries you may run into some situations where you need a deeper level of understanding about what is going on in order to solve your problem. Here are some tips and tricks that you can use in these cases. Note that many of the tips in this document will have a performance impact and are therefore not recommended for sustained production use. Use these tips locally or in production for a limited time to help get a better understanding of what is going on.

HTTP based clients

All of our auto-generated clients have a constructor to create a client that uses HTTP/JSON instead of gRPC. Additionally a couple of our hand-written clients like Storage and Bigquery are also HTTP based. Here are some tips for debugging these clients.

Try setting Go's HTTP debug variable

Try setting the following environment variable for verbose Go HTTP logging: GODEBUG=http2debug=1. To read more about this feature please see the godoc for net/http.

WARNING: Enabling this debug variable will log headers and payloads which may contain private information.

Add in your own logging with an HTTP middleware

You may want to add in your own logging around HTTP requests. One way to do this is to register a custom HTTP client with a logging transport built in. Here is an example of how you would do this with the storage client.

WARNING: Adding this middleware will log headers and payloads which may contain private information.

package main

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "net/http"
    "net/http/httputil"

    "cloud.google.com/go/storage"
    "google.golang.org/api/iterator"
    "google.golang.org/api/option"
    htransport "google.golang.org/api/transport/http"
)

type loggingRoundTripper struct {
    rt http.RoundTripper
}

func (d loggingRoundTripper) RoundTrip(r *http.Request) (*http.Response, error) {
    // Will create a dump of the request and body.
    dump, err := httputil.DumpRequest(r, true)
    if err != nil {
        log.Println("error dumping request")
    }
    log.Printf("%s", dump)
    return d.rt.RoundTrip(r)
}

func main() {
    ctx := context.Background()

    // Create a transport with authentication built-in detected with
    // [ADC](https://google.aip.dev/auth/4110). Note you will have to pass any
    // required scoped for the client you are using.
    trans, err := htransport.NewTransport(ctx,
        http.DefaultTransport,
        option.WithScopes(storage.ScopeFullControl),
    )
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }

    // Embed customized transport into an HTTP client.
    hc := &http.Client{
        Transport: loggingRoundTripper{rt: trans},
    }

    // Supply custom HTTP client for use by the library.
    client, err := storage.NewClient(ctx, option.WithHTTPClient(hc))
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer client.Close()
    // Use the client
}

gRPC based clients

Try setting grpc-go's debug variables

Try setting the following environment variables for grpc-go: GRPC_GO_LOG_VERBOSITY_LEVEL=99 GRPC_GO_LOG_SEVERITY_LEVEL=info. These are good for diagnosing connection level failures. For more information please see grpc-go's debug documentation.

Add in your own logging with a gRPC interceptors

You may want to add in your own logging around gRPC requests. One way to do this is to register a custom interceptor that adds logging. Here is an example of how you would do this with the secretmanager client. Note this example registers a UnaryClientInterceptor but you may want/need to register a StreamClientInterceptor instead-of/as-well depending on what kinds of RPCs you are calling.

WARNING: Adding this interceptor will log metadata and payloads which may contain private information.

package main

import (
    "context"
    "log"

    secretmanager "cloud.google.com/go/secretmanager/apiv1"
    "google.golang.org/api/option"
    "google.golang.org/grpc"
    "google.golang.org/grpc/metadata"
    "google.golang.org/protobuf/encoding/protojson"
    "google.golang.org/protobuf/reflect/protoreflect"
)

func loggingUnaryInterceptor() grpc.UnaryClientInterceptor {
    return func(ctx context.Context, method string, req, reply interface{}, cc *grpc.ClientConn, invoker grpc.UnaryInvoker, opts ...grpc.CallOption) error {
        err := invoker(ctx, method, req, reply, cc, opts...)
        log.Printf("Invoked method: %v", method)
        md, ok := metadata.FromOutgoingContext(ctx)
        if ok {
            log.Println("Metadata:")
            for k, v := range md {
                log.Printf("Key: %v, Value: %v", k, v)
            }
        }
        reqb, merr := protojson.Marshal(req.(protoreflect.ProtoMessage))
        if merr == nil {
            log.Printf("Request: %s", reqb)
        }
        return err
    }
}

func main() {
    ctx := context.Background()
    // Supply custom gRPC interceptor for use by the client.
    client, err := secretmanager.NewClient(ctx,
        option.WithGRPCDialOption(grpc.WithUnaryInterceptor(loggingUnaryInterceptor())),
    )
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer client.Close()
    // Use the client
}