Not planned Expose Server Error Log in admincp

[Alpha1]

Many admins don't know how or where to find the server error log and never or hardly ever look at it.
This means that errors that are not in the xenforo error log, go undetected.
In my opinion it would be beneficial for xenforo and its addon ecosystem if it would be easy to access the last x errors from the xenforo admincp
Even for tech savvy webmasters it would be easy to quickly peek into the server error when accessing the admincp and thereby the chances are bigger to become aware of issues.

 

[TPerry]

The issue is that on shared hosting you don't have access to your logs that you do on a VPS/dedicated server.. and then to top it off the logs are not always in the same place, dependent upon what OS you are using and what HTTP server, what MTA, etc.
If you are talking about XenForo error logs, of course you have a big banner notifying you on the ACP index page of them.

 

[S Thomas]

As I've said it on some other occasions before, server admin and xF admin are not the same thing. I would disagree on adding something like this to the core.
However, if super admins were like they were in XF 1.5 (config file edit needed) I essentially would have agreed, even though ftp access still does not mean that you are the server admin, but it is way closer to that.

 

[Alpha1]

Yes I know log location is a challenge This suggestion does not relate to the xenforo error log.

 

[we_are_borg]

For people on VPS and Dedicated server this could be beneficial i do not have to login into Plesk (in my case). The issue is only what Tracy Perry says Error Logs can differ from setup to setup. But if you can configure it to use an absolute path that would simplify matters. Yes you can argue that you get more support requests but you can also put it outside ticket help and give warning that you do not get support when viewing the error logs from the server.

 

[Kirby]

Many admins don't know how or where to find the server error log and never or hardly ever look at it.

What exactly is the "server error log"?
The webserver (Apache, nginx, etc.) error log?
The PHP error log?
Error log files from daemons like MySQL, MTA (Postfix, QMail, etc.), etc.?
Or syslog?

 

[Alpha1]

Good question! I was referring to the webserver error log.

 

[TPerry]

The issue is only what Tracy Perry says Error Logs can differ from setup to setup. But if you can configure it to use an absolute path that would simplify matters.

Even using absolute paths sometimes you may be sandboxed into a certain area for access via web interface.
I haven't used apache for ages, but it used to restrict you from anything higher than your base_dir location.
NGINX has the same ability, and if you use @eva2000's CentMin Mod I believe it's locked also by default if I remember correctly, which would prohibit the logs from being served (security issue).

 

[eva2000]

Even using absolute paths sometimes you may be sandboxed into a certain area for access via web interface.
I haven't used apache for ages, but it used to restrict you from anything higher than your base_dir location.
NGINX has the same ability, and if you use @eva2000's CentMin Mod I believe it's locked also by default if I remember correctly, which would prohibit the logs from being served (security issue).

You mean open_basedir ? Centmin Mod has that disabled these days too much trouble for folks

but exposing server log in admin wouldn't be ideal - some folks have web server logs in gigabytes in size !

 

[Jake B.]

Many admins don't know how or where to find the server error log and never or hardly ever look at it.

Curious as to what they'd do with this error log if they could access it. I can't imagine anyone that can't find the error log being able to fix any of the errors, and the errors contained in this log are likely to be completely unrelated to XenForo as those are all caught and logged to XF (assuming there isn't a database issue, which would prevent you from viewing the log anyways). At that point you'd probably be better off installing some log viewer that they can access if they need to for whatever reason.

 

[Chris D]

I can understand why it might be useful, but there are far too many gotchas that could be at play here to make it viable. We very likely wouldn't be able to infer the log path from anywhere automatically, so it would have to be user supplied. If they know where it is in the first place, it pretty much makes the reasons for implementing this fairly moot.

However, the biggest issue I think we'd face is file permissions, ownership and things like open_basedir restrictions. There's no way we, as an "untrusted" web-accessible PHP script, would ever be able to access log files stored in highly secure parts of the file system.

So, unfortunately, we'd probably have to pass on this at this time.

 

[Alpha1]

Thanks for the elaborate explanation.