How loud a run is

Every command takes the same two flags, and together they are one number.

Level	Flag	What appears
-1	-q, --quiet	warnings, the failure, and its fix hint
0	—	the steps: what happened
1	-v, --verbose	the plan and the phases: what the run is made of
2	-vv	every subprocess: what it does
3	-vvv	every return: exit code, and what came back
4	-vvvv	the output of a command that succeeded, too

They are cumulative: -vvv prints everything the levels below it print.

-q keeps the warnings

A step that may fail and let the run continue is the one thing you read a quiet log for. -q leaves those, the failure and the fix hint, and takes everything else.

cwp refuses -q and -v together before anything runs. They ask for opposite things, and choosing a winner quietly is worse than one line saying so.

Two levels apply everywhere, two do not

-q, -vv and -vvv work on every command: every subprocess cwp starts goes through one place, whatever the command was.

The plan and the phases are different. They exist for a command that has a plan, one that can write something, and most of cwp reads. cwp status, cwp doctor and cwp content list survey and report; there is nothing to declare and no phases to pass through, so -v adds nothing to them and does not pretend otherwise. Reference → What writes what lists the commands that declare a plan.

-v prints the plan and the phases

The plan is what the guards read, and it is the same block --dry-run prints. Given both, you get it once.

phase: survey
plan: 7 step(s) — 2 write to the local site, 0 to the environment
  1  read content down from staging
  2  import database  → local
  3  post-pull hook  → local  (best-effort)
phase: refuse
phase: consent
phase: apply
✓ read content down from staging

A step names a side only where it writes to one. A step that writes a file into your repository writes to no site. (best-effort) marks a step whose failure the run survives; everything else ends it.

On a live run the list stops at twenty rows and says how many it kept back. A dry run prints them all, because printing the plan is the whole of what it does.

-vv prints every command

Each subprocess as it runs:

$ cloudron exec --app staging -- wp db export /tmp/db.sql

This is the level a fix hint means when it says “re-run with -vv”.

-vvv prints what came back

$ cloudron exec --app staging -- wp db export /tmp/db.sql
  exit 0 · 3 line(s) out

Standard error appears whenever there is any. Standard output appears only for a command that failed. That is a safety rule rather than a display choice. cwp’s stdout is the run’s payload: an options read carries whatever the site stores, and a database path carries a dump. On a failure the payload is the diagnosis. Otherwise the way to see it is to run the command the line above printed. No level prints what a command received on standard input.

Each stream stops at 20 lines or 2 KiB, whichever comes first, and says how many lines it dropped.

Each phase gets a total as the next one starts:

phase: survey
  survey · 1.4s
phase: refuse

Durations, a command’s and a phase’s alike, appear only when the output goes to a terminal. They are the one part of this output that differs between two identical runs.

-vvvv prints the output of a command that worked

The fourth rung exists so the third can stay safe. Ask for it when you are debugging and you know what the command returns:

cwp pull staging --dry-run -vvvv

It prints the same capped excerpt for every command rather than only for the ones that failed. On the wrong command that includes a credential or a list of addresses. For that reason it sits one v further than anybody types by accident. It is not the default.

Where a flag cannot reach

CWP_VERBOSE sets the level for a hook or a CI step, from -1 to 4. A flag on the command line wins over it.

CWP_VERBOSE=2 cwp pull staging

What the level does not change

--json prints the same envelope at every level. The level is for a person watching. A machine caller reads steps and data, and those are complete without it. All of the output above goes to standard error, so it never mixes with the envelope on standard output.