How Do I Enable Debug Mode in DokuWiki?

The following instructions reference $DOCROOT to mean the document root where your DokuWiki is installed and $USER is the Linux system username of the user that owns the domain. On cPanel, the document root is typically /home/$USER/public_html/, and on DirectAdmin, this is typically

  /home/$USER/domains/yourdomain.tld/public_html/.

To enable debug mode for DokuWiki, you will edit the configuration file located at $DOCROOT/conf/dokuwiki.php Debug tools:

Find the following within the configuration file:

  $conf['allowdebug']  = 0;                 //allow debug output, enable if needed 0|1

And change it like so:

  $conf['allowdebug']  = 1;                 //allow debug output, enable if needed 0|1

Now, you should start to see debug output logging to $DOCROOT/data/cache/debug.log.

Other ways of using Debug mode in DokuWiki include:

• Appending ?do=debug or &do=debug to URL so DokuWiki will output a huge list of debug strings.
• Appending ?httpdebug or &httpdebug to URL to enable debugging output in DokuWiki’s HTTPClient

That’s it! You should now be able to repeat actions that are giving errors or unexpected results on the site and see the associated error. Once you have the error, you can research it, identify the problem, and fix the issue.