---

name: configuration-diagnostics-cli description: "Use this Dask sub-skill for configuration files and environment variables, the dask command line interface, local diagnostics/profiling/progress, callbacks/cache, scheduler/deployment documentation routing, install extras troubleshooting, and development/test command lookup." disable-model-invocation: true metadata: disco-role: operating license: BSD 3-Clause

Configuration, Diagnostics, and CLI

Use this sub-skill when the task involves Dask configuration, local runtime diagnostics, the dask CLI, install extras, or contributor validation commands.

Route By Task

• Configuration values: Start with references/configuration.md for dask.config.get, set, YAML search paths, environment variables, schema defaults, and import-time config caveats.
• CLI workflows: Use references/cli-reference.md for dask --help, dask config ..., dask docs, dask info versions, entry-point registration, and safe smoke checks.
• Progress and profiling: Use references/diagnostics-and-performance.md for ProgressBar, Profiler, ResourceProfiler, CacheProfiler, Callback, and Cache.
• Development commands: Use references/development-and-testing.md for pixi, pytest, lint, doctest, and targeted validation commands.
• Failures and caveats: Use references/troubleshooting.md for DASK_CONFIG, YAML parse errors, missing config keys, optional diagnostics dependencies, distributed-vs-core scheduler confusion, browser-opening CLI behavior, and warnings-as-errors.

Boundaries

• Route array-specific settings such as chunking, rechunking, slicing, array backends, and array query planning to the array workflow sub-skill after checking the generic config mechanics here.
• Route dataframe-specific settings such as shuffle, parquet, string conversion, dataframe backends, and dataframe query planning to the dataframe workflow sub-skill after checking the generic config mechanics here.
• Route task graph, delayed, compute, persist, annotations, and scheduler API design to the core graphs/schedulers sub-skill; use this sub-skill only for selecting or troubleshooting scheduler/config surfaces.
• Do not require the original repository checkout at runtime; use bundled references and scripts/dask_cli_smoke.py for CLI smoke validation.

Safe Smoke Script

Run the bundled smoke script against the active Python environment when you need a quick, side-effect-light CLI check:

python scripts/dask_cli_smoke.py --help
python scripts/dask_cli_smoke.py

The default script run checks dask --help, dask config get temporary-directory, dask config list, and dask info versions without writing configuration files or opening a browser.