Troubleshooting Joomla 1.5 plugin remotely

[Mike Pearl]

A J!1.5 plugin of mine works fine on my test server, but one of my users is having problems on their site.  Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can troubleshoot the problem remotely?

Best,

Mike

[Nick Savov]

Hi Mike,

You can use screenshare technology. e.g. http://www.teamviewer.com/ or
http://www.gotomeeting.com/

Kind regards,
Nick

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[Mike Pearl]

Nick,

That won't really help in this case.  I need to step through/watch variables to see what's going on in the code.  Any thoughts on how to step through the code and watch variables on a live, remote site?

Best,

Mike 

[Swapnil Shah]

Mike, 

Best thing I can recommend is output the variables and/or array to a text file on the server. For example when joomla outputs to an error.php or logs deprecated usage. 

Depending on the type of hosting package, you can use xdebug / send debugger to step through the code. If its a shared hosting package, chances are going to slim that the host will let you install a debugger. 

You best bet will to output the array you are looking for to a file than you can retrieve that file and go from there. Quite a bit slower, but you might be able to see if a variable exists or not.  

Question, you are able to test the plugin using a backup copy of the site? Your client might have another extension that is messing around with variables you are looking for. 

Hope that helps, good luck! 

Regards, 

Neil

Sent from my iPhone

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[Nick Weavers]

I don't know about other IDE's but in the one I use it is easy to set up for remote debugging of live sites. It can also do parallel debugging which is extremely useful, and JIT debugging. Here's an link to the debugging facilities it provides  http://www.nusphere.com/products/php_debugger_advanced.htm. The IDE isn't cheap, but it's very fast,stable and reliable and hugely increased my productivity when I stared using it about 8 years ago.   

For security, remote debugging can be done via an SSH tunnel. For this I use Bitvise Tunnelier which is free, excellent and makes tunnelling a doddle to set up.

(I'm not affiliated to either company in any way, I just happen like their products.) 

However, as Niel said, "If its a shared hosting package, chances are going to be slim that the host will let you install a debugger." 

Cheers,

Nick

[editor]

If you have root shell access to your hosting server, then you have many
options. However, as others have said, SSH is highly unlikely with
shared hosting.

One option would be to find an old PC lying around somewhere, download
Ubuntu (or similar) live CD, install it, then install Apache2, PHP5 &
MySQL5. It really is pretty straightforward. My totally non-techy g/f
did this in about an hour or so, in order to experiment with a Wordpress
project she was working on. She wanted to avoid putting her live site at
risk if she screwed something up. It worked a treat!

Thing is, once you have a local webserver set up, you can make a copy of
your Joomla site onto that server and play with IDE's and debuggers till
your heart's content. And it needn't cost you a penny!

You could even have multiple copies of Joomla running on the same
machine. This is handy in the event that you mess something up, or you
want to upgrade your extension to the next version of Joomla, etc. You
could even tweak your firewall/router to give you access to your test
server from outside the building, if you wanted - though obviously the
performance would be pretty poor over a standard ASDL.

FWIW, I have several Ubuntu-based (web)servers in my house that I use
for all sorts of stuff, including Joomla/Wordpress/ZoneMinder
development, media servers, remote access to files via SSHFS, RSync,
etc. etc.

I love 'em ! lol :-)

Just a thought, best wishes, G

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