tracebin

Quickstart

From zero to your first collected files in about five minutes. This is the support-engineer path; if a customer sent you here instead, see you were sent a tracebin link.

1. Sign up

Create an account at tracebin.dev with email and password, and confirm via the email you receive. No card, nothing to install.

2. Create a bin

A bin is the workspace for one support case: its collection spec, its collection links, and every run of collected files.

Click Create bin and fill in:

  • Title — the only required field. Use your ticket reference or the customer name.
  • Description — internal notes, never shown to the customer.
  • Collection spec — what the script will collect on the customer's machine:
    • Globs — file patterns, e.g. /var/log/myapp/*.log. A pattern that matches nothing on the customer's machine produces a warning, not a failure.
    • Commands — e.g. docker logs --tail 1000 myapp-prod. Output is captured per command with its exit code. Tick Run in container on a command to execute it inside the container instead of on the host.
    • Container name — set this to also collect the globs from inside a named Docker container, using the customer's existing Docker access.
    • Customer run command — optional wrap mode: the link runs this command first (with the customer's up-front consent), waits for it to exit, then collects and uploads automatically. Use it for "reproduce the problem, then grab everything" in one step.
    • Include file inventory — also record names, sizes, and modification times (never contents) of files in the glob directories, so you can see what actually exists when a glob comes back empty.
  • Collection link expiry — 24 hours, 7 days (default), or 30 days.

3. Copy the one-liner

The bin is created with a collection link already minted. Copy it from the bin page:

curl -sSL https://tracebin.dev/c/<token>/run | sh

The token is unguessable, works only for this bin, and expires on the schedule you chose. The bin page also shows exactly what this link collects, plus a download-first variant for customers who want to read the script before running it.

4. Send it to the customer

The customer needs no account. If they open the link in a browser first, they get a page listing exactly what will be collected. When they run the command, the script collects the spec'd items, then stops at the manifest gate: a list of every collected file with size and source, and an upload prompt. Nothing uploads until they approve, and they can exclude individual files first.

5. The run appears

As soon as the customer approves, a run appears on your bin page: every file with size and SHA-256 hash, command outputs with exit codes and durations, the file inventory if enabled, and the full manifest.json. Files download straight from storage.

Each later collection with the same link becomes its own numbered run, so re-collections never overwrite anything.

When the link expires

Expired links stop working entirely — the customer sees a clear "link expired" message and nothing else. Tokens turn amber in the bin page's token table 24 hours before expiry. Generating a fresh link for the same bin is one click.

Something not working? Troubleshooting is organized by exact error message. Everything the spec fields do, including edge behavior: spec reference.