Help:Identifying bugs

Identifying bugs
This help page provides information about methods to identify issues and bugs with the software
Table of Contents

Identifying bugs an thus better reporting of bugs can be achieved by the following methods:

Stack traces (PHP)

Stack traces (example) supply extra information typically associated with errors/exceptions that help developers figure out what is going wrong. Thus they are often needed in order to get bugs fixed. By default stack traces are not shown on a MediaWiki install as this is not something desired when running a production wiki. However if you are running into an issue and the developer needs more information, please follow the instructions described below to get a stack trace if an the error occurs on your wiki. After retrieving this information you should again remove or comment out the settings.

On the top of your wiki's "LocalSettings.php" file (below the first comment block), add the following lines:

Regular

These settings should be sufficient in most cases:

error_reporting( -1 ); // catch all PHP errors
ini_set( 'display_errors', 1 ); // show the PHP errors caught
$wgShowExceptionDetails = true;
$wgShowSQLErrors = true;
$wgShowDBErrorBacktrace = true;

Intense

These settings show and log everything that may come along the way:

error_reporting( -1 ); // catch all PHP errors
ini_set( 'display_errors', 1 ); // show the PHP errors caught
$wgDebugToolbar = true;
$wgDebugComments = true;
$wgLogQueries = true;
$wgDebugDumpSql = true;
$wgDevelopmentWarnings  = true;
$wgDebugProfiling = true;
$wgDebugTimestamps = true;
$wgResourceLoaderDebug  = true;

Optionally you can install Xdebug, which is a PHP extension which provides debugging and profiling capabilities.

JavaScript errors (Browser)

Identifying issues caused by JavaScript or modules that failed to load, the browser console 1 2 should be consulted.

Sometimes it can also be helpful to enable the ResourceLoader debug mode.