Is it possible to see/lookup the commands that are issued when I click some action in cockpit?

[Tronde]

Hi folks,
Here is my example that should help understand my question:

I'm using the cockpit-machines plugin to manage my virtual machines (VM). When I add some disk to a VM I would like to know which exactly command was used including it's arguments, parameters and options.

Is there any log where I could find this information?

For some more background on my question please see my issue here.

Thank you in advance for you help and guidance.

[martinpitt]

A lot of the actions that Cockpit (also the Machines page) do is not through executing commands, but through other APIs -- most of them are through D-Bus services, some also through writing files or sending socket requests. That said, cockpit-machines calls virt-xml and virt-install a lot, and for your issue that could actually be enough. You can see what happens by opening the developer console (Ctrl+Shift+J in Chromium, Ctrl+Shift+K in firefox) and setting window.debugging = "spawn". Then any action that you do from then on that causes a program to be called will be logged there, and you also see its output and result.

[Tronde]

Where do you set window.debugging = "spawn"? Do you set it as filter in the developer console or somewhere else?

[martinpitt]

As a JS command in the developer console. But I just saw that current version only gives you "process closed" and "process output", not the actual command argv vector. That needs to be fixed 😢