Magento debugging - Magento tips - Magento Design and Development

Quick debugging tip

Posted on 03. Sep, 2008 by Fido in Development, Magento, Module

You can add items to magento’s system log and exception log in your code. This is very handy for pin-pointing coding errors / problems. Developing for Magento is often hard, especially since it’s not always possibly to have error reporting on (and even when it is on, its hard to find exactly what’s wrong!).

Here’s an example of it’s use:

1) Turn on your logging: Admin > Configuration > Developer > Log Settings > Enabled = Yes

2) Example code snippet where you might find this useful:

<?php
$response = curl_exec($ch); //just an example of something - might use this in a custom payment or shipping module

Mage::log($responseBody);
?>

3) Watch your var/log/system.log and var/log/exception.log for raw information from this.

You may run into file permission errors, so you might need to set your folder permissions appropriately

Tags: debugging, magento development, php

7 Comments

aledujke

07. Nov, 2008

I’m currently working with observers and this helped me a lot.

Thanks!

jimmy

21. Jul, 2009

thanks a lot

Stephan Miller

29. Aug, 2009

Thanks. I needed this. I knew how to turn it on. Just wasn’t sure where the info would be logged.

Jared Blalock

09. Dec, 2009

Thanks for the tip, this could come in handy!

ScreencastWorld

24. Feb, 2010

Thanks. I had logging enabled but needed the to know how to log additional events to the log files. Now I know – Mage::log();

Jhourlad Estrella

20. Apr, 2010

You can find the log files on your app/var/log directory. Errors generated by the system goes to exception.log and debug texts logged through Mage::log() goes to system.log