Options that help when troubleshooting

By default, use-package will attempts to catch and report errors that occur during expansion of use-package declarations in your init file. Customize the user option use-package-expand-minimally to a non-nil value to disable this checking.

This behavior may be overridden locally using the :catch keyword. If t or nil, it enables or disables catching errors at load time. It can also be a function taking two arguments: the keyword being processed at the time the error was encountered, and the error object (as generated by condition-case). For example:

(use-package example
  ;; Note that errors are never trapped in the preface, since
  ;; doing so would hide definitions from the byte-compiler.
  :preface (message "I'm here at byte-compile and load time")
  :init (message "I'm always here at startup")
  :config
  (message "I'm always here after the package is loaded")
  (error "oops")
  ;; Don't try to (require 'example), this is just an example!
  :no-require t
  :catch (lambda (keyword err)
           (message (error-message-string err))))

Evaluating the above form will print these messages:

I'm here at byte-compile and load time
I'm always here at startup
Configuring package example...
I'm always here after the package is loaded
oops