(This change is in v0.12.0+)

Inspired by this blog post about reporting configuration file locations and the ensuing HackerNews commentary. I’ve added the config get and config blame management commands for getting the final configuration and the source of each property in the configuration, respectively. I had previously added the file locations used by lnav in the lnav -h output as recommended by the blog post. But, the HN comments made a good case for adding the the other troubleshooting tooling as well.

If you would like to try out these new commands, you need to run lnav with the -m option to switch to the “management” mode. For example, just running lnav with this flag will print out the available operations:

$ lnav -m
✘ error: expecting an operation to perform
 = help: the available operations are:
          • config: perform operations on the lnav configuration
          • format: perform operations on log file formats
          • piper: perform operations on piper storage
          • regex101: create and edit log message regular expressions using regex101.com

Executing config get will print out the final configuration that lnav is operating with as JSON:

$ lnav -m config get

If you would like to know the source of the value for each property, you can use the config blame command, like so:

$ lnav -m config blame | tail
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/black -> solarized-light.json:15
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/blue -> solarized-light.json:21
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/cyan -> solarized-light.json:22
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/green -> solarized-light.json:23
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/magenta -> solarized-light.json:19
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/orange -> solarized-light.json:17
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/red -> solarized-light.json:18
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/semantic_highlight_color -> solarized-light.json:24
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/violet -> solarized-light.json:20
/ui/theme-defs/solarized-light/vars/yellow -> solarized-light.json:16

In the above output, “solarized-light.json” file is built into the lnav executable and is not from the file system.