Basic troubleshooting - HebaruSan/CKAN GitHub Wiki

This page will supply you with basic troubleshooting advice to get CKAN running on the off chance that it doesn't work out of the box as well as attempt to answer some frequent questions seen on irc. Note that this page is an eternal work in progress and might lack answers to certain problems or have notes of additions to be made. A process to work around most errors caused by changing metadata is to clean and reinstall your KSP installation.

CKAN won't start

If you are on an macOS or Linux system first of all make sure that you have the latest version of Mono. This also applies if you are getting the Error in autoupdate: Error getting response stream (Write: The authentication or decryption has failed.): SendFailure message on startup.

You can check your current version with mono --version in a terminal of your choice
If you are on macOS Catalina or later, the GUI is no longer functional. Use CKAN v1.26.6 or later, which defaults to the console UI.
Try redownloading the ckan.exe and running it again.
Put the ckan.exe inside your KSP root directory and try running it from there if you aren't already doing so
Under Linux or macOS you might need to update mono's certificates. See SSL certificate errors if you encounter errors related to certificates.
As of version 1.6.6 CKAN requires a libcurl library under Linux which can be installed via apt-get in Debian derivatives and is named libcurl4-openssl-dev. In Fedora derivatives or other dists using RPM use yum install libcurl-devel
Later versions of CKAN requires .NET 4.5 when ran under Windows, make sure you have it installed and updated.
If you are getting a ERROR CKAN.KSP (null) - Could not find KSP version message and you have your ckan.exe stored somewhere other than your KSP directory, make sure you don't have a "GameData" folder in the same location. CKAN will erroneously assume there is a complete KSP installation there and fail. Put ckan.exe in its own folder and you should be right.

CKAN throws a "ModuleNotFound" Kraken every time I try to do anything

CKAN may have a corrupted download of the main repository metadata. Try running this before raising a bug report:

ckan.exe update

I'm on Unix, I cannot run .exe files!

You can with this one, because ckan is magic! More seriously, the ckan client is built using Mono, which makes it a cross-platform executable.

You will need to install the latest Mono release in order to use the ckan client on a Unix platform.

I installed CKAN but some mods are marked as AD and I cannot interact with them

AD stands for AutoDetected and mean CKAN has detected the mod as already installed within your GameData folder. This stems from manually installed mods and since CKAN has not installed them it will not care for them since it cannot guarantee consistency. To make mods not be AD anymore you can manually uninstall them and then install them via CKAN instead.

I have a very fast broadband connection but files are downloading extremely slow

This can be due to many reasons:

If you are installing very many or large mods at once the supplier of those mods might throttle your download speed (this is known to sometimes happen while downloading many mods at once from Github repositories). Since CKAN cache all your finished downloads it can at times help to cancel the download, wait a few minutes and then try again. You will not have to redownload finished downloads from the previous session.
Some mod developers use their own hosting solutions which might have slower upload or be under heavy load. You can see what sources CKAN download mods from in the installation window during the installation process.

I get errors when I attempt to download mods

All mods you download through CKAN are hosted on pages outside of CKAN's control. These include SpaceDock, Github and a variety of more or less private solutions. If a mod repeatedly fail to download the page supplying it might be down. If you get many failed downloads in a short time a good first step is to check if www.spacedock.info is up since that is one of the primary suppliers of mods through CKAN.

If you're on Linux or macOS, make sure your Mono installation is complete and fully configured.

When attempting to download and install a lot of mods I get 403 errors

If these errors are pointed towards GitHub adresses it's because GitHub has a limit of downloads per amount of time. If you're on a fast connection (or unlucky) you might hit that limit. All finished downloads will be cached within CKAN and the easiest way to get around the 403s is to wait some time and then attempt the installation again. 403s will make CKAN stop the installation of all mods in the current batch as to make sure that your GameData folder isn't corrupted.

I get a `System.InvalidCastException` on Linux. Help!

Alas, you may have hit this bug. You'll have to use the command-line for now, or update your version of Mono.

I get a CodePage 437 not supported error

Apparently mono installations don't come with as much locale support as we expect! If you're on a Ubuntu/Mint/Debian machine, try:

sudo apt-get install libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-i18n-west4.0-cil

GUI won't work on macOS, I get a big scary message (or nothing happens at all)!

If this mentions an InvalidCastException, you're likely experiencing an issue with Mono, if you haven't already update to the latest version of Mono.

If nothing happens at all when you double click CKAN.app and you are on macOS Catalina or later, you should upgrade to CKAN v1.26.6 or later. It will default to the console UI, because the GUI is no longer functional due to Apple removing 32-bit support on 10.15+.

Okay, how do I get to the command prompt?

On Windows, follow the instructions from this awesome reddit comment:

In the folder where the .exe lives go up one folder.
Hold shift and right-click the folder you just left.
Select "open command window here"
Type ckan.exe help to get started!

On Linux or macOS, open a new terminal window and navigate to the folder where you placed ckan.exe and run:

mono ckan.exe help

Note: on Windows, you don't need Mono provided you have the .NET framework installed (and you most likely have it by default).