If you are talking about simply getting link up on a physical port, typically you would set the port to the expectation of the client as you seem to have done. Patience is also a key in explict port settings they can take some time to come up in some cases.
With setting explicit speed and duplex you should also set the no-autonegotiation parameter to insure the port waits for the device to fully link up without falling back to autonegotiation.
Removing the link speed and duplex with no settings should turn on gig autonegotiation by default.
You can see messages on the port status changes in the messages log.
show log messages
You will need to know the ifIndex for the port you are testing which you can see in
show interface ge-0/0/0 | match ifindex