Getting help

Where to ask, what to include in a report, and how issues are triaged.

Guide Updated 22 October 2026 View as Markdown

Noust is maintained by one person and a few contributors. This page says where to ask, what makes a report fixable in one pass, and what happens to an issue after you open it.

Where to ask

You want to	Go to
Report a security problem	A private advisory: https://github.com/Perkybeet/noust/security/advisories/new, or the email in SECURITY.md. Never a public issue. SECURITY.md says what happens next and when.
Report a bug	A bug report
Ask for a feature	A feature request
Ask for an application in the catalogue	A recipe request, and how to write one
Ask how to do something	First the documentation, then troubleshooting. If it is not answered there, open an issue labelled `documentation`: the answer then goes into the page that should have had it.
Contribute a change	CONTRIBUTING.md (the four rules, the architecture and how to run the checks).

There is no chat room or forum yet. A community channel is a decision about how the project is launched, and that decision has not been taken; until it is, an issue is the channel.

What to include

Run this on the server, as root, and paste its output into the report:

Shell

noust support report

It collects what a maintainer would otherwise ask for one question at a time: the Noust version and how it was installed, the distribution and where it stands against the platforms Noust supports, the health report, every application's state, the diagnosis of the ones that need attention, the Noust units and the last lines of the console's journal.

Secrets are masked before anything is printed. Noust masks every secret it knows (its own configuration, each application's .env) and anything shaped like one (a token, a private key, an Authorization header, the password in a connection string, the value of a NAME=value whose name says it is secret). Read it before you post it anyway: a report is a copy of your server.
Domains and the host's name are included. noust support report --hide-domains replaces them with app-1, app-2 and host through the whole document, consistently.
From the console, Settings > About Noust has the same report with a Copy button.
For a problem with one application, add noust diagnose DOMAIN.
--output FILE writes it to a file only you can read; --json prints it as data.

What makes a report fixable

The version and how Noust was installed. The report has them; so does noust --version.
What you did and what you expected. The commands, in order.
What happened instead, verbatim. Paste the error as it appeared. Noust never paraphrases a system error (nginx's, systemd's, certbot's), because the exact words are usually the diagnosis.
Whether it happens every time.

How issues are triaged

New issues get the needs-triage label from their template. The maintainer reads them and, in one pass, gives each an area (console, cli, deploy, web-server, databases, backups, fleet, packaging, documentation) and a verdict:

Label	Meaning
`confirmed`	Reproduced, or clearly a defect from the report. It goes on the list of what is fixed next.
`needs-info`	Something is missing (the version, the support report, the steps). The issue waits for you; one that stays unanswered is closed, and reopens when you answer.
`duplicate`	Already reported; closed with a link to the original, where the discussion continues.
`wontfix`	Will not change, with the reason in the thread. A feature request that does not fit the product is closed this way, politely and with the reason.
`good first issue`	Small and well described; a good way into the code.

The labels are defined in .github/labels.yml. There is no promise about how fast the first answer comes: Noust does not publish a response time it cannot keep. The only timed commitment is for security reports, in SECURITY.md.

Fixes ship in the next patch release of each supported line (see the table in SECURITY.md). A release does not change behaviour in a patch: the release policy says what a patch, a minor and a major version may contain.