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Troubleshooting & FAQ

Common issues and how to diagnose them.

My request triggered the wrong crew (or got partial answer)

Rephrase or split into two sentences. The classifier looks at the verbs and domain keywords; an ambiguous prompt like "tell me about Apple" may trigger news_daily rather than company_profiler. Try "Generate a company profile for Apple Inc." instead.

I see no HTML/JSON output for a crew

  1. Check output/<crew>/ — file may exist but with a slightly different name than expected.
  2. Check logs/epic_news.log for an ❌ line near the end of the run.
  3. Some crews (RSS weekly, holiday planner) write the JSON before the HTML step — if HTML failed, JSON will still be there.

I didn't receive the email

Open logs/epic_news.log and look for the 📨 PostResult line:

  • status=success → email was delivered. Check spam folder, and verify MAIL in .env points to the address you actually check (not the default fred.jacquet@gmail.com).
  • status=failure → read error_message:
  • "No connected account found for user ID default for toolkit gmail" → you need to authorize Gmail in Composio under entity default. Go to app.composio.dev, Connections → Add connection → Gmail → use default as user/entity ID.
  • "Failed to read content from output_file: …/report.html" → the upstream HTML rendering failed; look earlier in the log for an ❌ line. The v2.1.0 attachment guard now drops missing files automatically.
  • No 📨 line at all → the send_email step never reached PostCrew. Look for 📬 Preparing to send email... then check what came right after.

Composio Gmail tool returns a draft instead of sending

In v2.1.0+ the PostCrew explicitly requests GMAIL_SEND_EMAIL first and only falls back to GMAIL_CREATE_EMAIL_DRAFT if Composio doesn't return the send variant (typically a paid-plan limitation). Run

uv run python -c "from epic_news.config.composio_config import ComposioConfig; print([t.name for t in ComposioConfig().get_gmail_email_tools(include_send=True)])"

If GMAIL_SEND_EMAIL is missing from the list, your Composio plan does not expose it — re-OAuth or upgrade.

API errors

Ensure .env is set up against .env.example. Common required keys:

  • OPENROUTER_API_KEY, MODEL
  • COMPOSIO_API_KEY (for Gmail, Notion, Slack, …)
  • RAPIDAPI_KEY (ScrapeNinja default scraper)
  • FIRECRAWL_API_KEY (alternative scraper)
  • KRAKEN_API_KEY, KRAKEN_API_SECRET (FinDailyCrew crypto)
  • SERPAPI_API_KEY, TAVILY_API_KEY, EXA_API_KEY (search providers)

Old code runs after I edited a file

The CrewAI flow is a long-running process. If you launch a flow then edit Python source while it's still running, the in-memory class remains the old version. Cancel the flow and restart, or remove __pycache__/ if a .pyc got out of sync:

find . -type d -name __pycache__ -exec rm -rf {} +

Where to look next