Common pitfalls and answers

mapping values are not allowed here, line [x] column [y]

A) You have : -character in somewhere where it's not allowed. If you have : in example series name, you must put name in quotes.

series:
  - name
      path: ~/name/

Reason: Name is missing : at the end.

B) Indentation error. Thumb rule is that every time line ends with : -character next line must be indented either 2 spaces more or less.

This is invalid

series:
  - name:
    watched:
      season: 1

It should be:

series:
  - name:
      watched:
        season: 1

Note that you need to use an extra indentation (kind of) after a line that starts with a dash (-) and ends with a colon (:).

ValueError: unsupported format character '"' (0x22) at .…

In case you are using RSS input, try forcing it into ASCII.

rss:
  url: http://example.com
  ascii: true

RSS Feed ... is not valid XML

Two possibilities, you're not receiving RSS feed for some reason (ie. must be logged in, cookies). Or the feed server sends is made by monkeys and isn't well formed XML. You can use ​this service to check if the feed is broken.

cron job did not run - permission problems

Check that you have working mail system so you receive errors occur during crontab execution.

Feel free to add more

Error in the cookie files

If you get an error like:

/usr/lib/python2.6/_MozillaCookieJar.py:109: UserWarning: cookielib bug!
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/_MozillaCookieJar.py", line 82, in _really_load
    assert domain_specified == initial_dot
AssertionError

  _warn_unhandled_exception()

And you know your Netscape cookie file is properly formatted, but you just can't get it to work, try rewriting the cookie file with curl:

curl -b oldcookiefile.txt --cookie-jar newcookiefile.txt http://url

Distribution Not Found

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/flexget", line 5, in <module>
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 2707, in <module>
    working_set.require(__requires__)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 686, in require
    needed = self.resolve(parse_requirements(requirements))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 584, in resolve
    raise DistributionNotFound(req)
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: FlexGet==1.0r2175

This may happen when you upgrade your linux distribution and python version gets replaced with newer one, for example 2.6 with 2.7. Now when you try to run flexget command it will use newer version of python and FlexGet is not installed on that. To fix the problem just reinstall FlexGet.