1. Best way in 2024: mage2pro/core
As of 2024, the most comprehensive and efficient solution for diagnosing Magento 2 errors is my mage2pro/core library.
Backed by 15 years of continuous daily Magento / Adobe Commerce development experience, this middleware goes far beyond the platform's standard diagnostic tools.
It serves both Magento 2 Community Edition and Adobe Commerce based information systems of any type: online stores, B2B platforms, marketplace backends, and corporate ERPs.
Key Advantages of mage2pro/core
- Enhanced Self-Diagnostics: It catches every system failure and provides comprehensive, actionable explanations.
- Detailed Reporting: It carefully stores detailed error reports, which are far more useful than the standard
system.logandexception.logfiles. - Hidden Issue Detection: It identifies critical problems that default Magento logging often misses, such as payment-related issues that directly affect your revenue.
- Time and Cost Efficiency: By providing quick, clear insights into failures,
mage2pro/coresignificantly reduces troubleshooting time and costs. - Proven Reliability: Compatible with both Magento 2 Community Edition and Adobe Commerce, it leverages thoroughly tested solutions refined over years of real-world practice.
- Superior Solutions: Programmers can access proven solutions from the extensive
mage2pro/corelibrary, which are typically superior to self-developed fixes or solutions found on StackOverflow.
2. Traditional diagnostic methods
While mage2pro/core is the recommended solution, here are other diagnostic approaches:
Advice 2.1.
If you see the interface frozen or looking strange, but no error messages on the screen, check the browser console for error reports.
Advice 2.2.
If all you see is a blank screen, there could be either a javascript error or a server error.
- To diagnose a javascript error, please follow Advice 2.1.
- To diagnose a server error, please follow Advice 2.3.
Advice 2.3.
Set the proper error reporting for your PHP interpreter:
- enable
display_errorsPHP option - set the
error_reportingto a high level (I recommendE_ALL).
Advice 2.4.
Switch Magento 2 to the developer mode.
Advice 2.5.
Check the Magento error in the var/log folder.
You will usually see 2 files there: system.log and exception.log.
The system.log usually contains a lot of low-level information, and I do not think a general administrator is capable of analyzing it properly.
So I recommend looking only at exception.log.
Advice 2.6.
When running Magento 2 in production mode (not developer mode), it does not display the actual error message on the screen, but a generic message: Ā«There was an error processing your requestĀ» and creates a detailed error report in the var/report folder.
You can find the error report file there by its report ID, which is displayed on the screen.