How do I report BLAST+ problems?

If you have encountered a problem with BLAST+ (stand-alone BLAST ® applications), you may first want to:

• Verify that you are using the latest version of BLAST+ by checking against the BLAST+ Release Notes page. A bug causing your problem may have been solved already! 
• Check for any reports of a widespread problem that we may post on the BLAST home page, distribute through the BLAST Mailing list or post on our social media (NCBI Twitter Feed or NCBI Facebook Page).

If the above does not help, please write to us at:  blast-help@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Ideally, we would like to receive detailed information that will allow us to reproduce and investigate the problem. The items that we need are:

1. Summary: a brief, but specific description of the problem (for example, use "blastn crash with outfmt 7" instead of "blastn crashes")

2. Version of BLAST: This can be obtained by running any BLAST+ application with the -version-full argument: 

$ blastn -version-full
blastn: 2.15.0+
 Package: blast 2.15.0, build Oct 19 2023 15:45:46
 Package-Config:  
 Build-Signature:  GCC_730-ReleaseMT64--x86_64-unknown-linux3.10.0-gnu2.17-coremake22
 GI-64bit:  TRUE
 Build-Date:  Oct 19 2023 16:29:50
 Revision:  674175
 Subversion-Revision:  674175
 Stable-Components-Version:  28
 Development-Version:  20230606
 Built-As:  blastn

3. Details: Provide us with steps that we can follow to reproduce the problem, including command line arguments, inputs, and outputs.  It would especially help us if you:

• Set the environment variables DIAG_TRACE=1 and DIAG_POST_LEVEL=Trace prior to running the command that fails (see examples below).
• Capture the output and send it along with your report.

Examples of setting the DIAG_TRACE/DIAG_POST_LEVEL variables:

export DIAG_TRACE=1
export DIAG_POST_LEVEL=Trace

setenv DIAG_TRACE 1
setenv DIAG_POST_LEVEL Trace

4. System information:

For UNIX-like operating systems, use the output of the following command:

uname -a
ulimit -a
env
free
lscpu

sysctl -a

For Windows operating systems:

• Access the Start menu (All Programs) by pressing the window key on your keyboard.
• Locate the Run... command (Figure 1). 
• If not already entered, type msinfo32 and press the Enter key.
• In the resulting window, click File, then Export... 
• Save the file that contains the operating system information and provide the file to us.  If you need more help, see the Microsoft site that addresses obtaining system information. 

Figure 1: The Run command.