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• DSpace log: [dspace]/log/dspace.log (usually)
  • [dspace] is the location where DSpace is installed.
• Tomcat log directory: [tomcat]/logs (usually)
  • [tomcat] is the location where Tomcat is installed.
• (v1.x-6.x XMLUI Only) Cocoon log:
  • DSpace 1.5.1 or previous: [tomcat]/webapps/<name-of-webapp>/WEB-INF/logs/
  • DSpace 1.5.2 or later: [dspace]/log/cocoon.log

Resources

• DSpace Documentation - This would be the place to start for any installation or configuration problems
• Mailing Lists - Search the archives of our mailing lists for similar issues
• Directly search or browse the DSpace Issue Tracker for known/fixed bugs: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues and https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues
• StackOverflow ("dspace" tag) - We now encourage technical questions to be asked on StackOverflow, so you may wish to search/browse there to see if anyone has encountered this problem before.
• Support - Where to go for support once you find the error message

General Instructions

DSpace 7.x

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or

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8.x

1. Finding the Error Message in the User Interface (Try this first!)

In DSpace 7, the The User Interface is built with JavaScript (Angular.io). This means that some errors are only visible in your browser (and therefore will never appear in log files).

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1. If the expected information simply never appears, leaving a blank browser screen, the problem is likely with either a servlet (for JSPUI) or an XSLT Theme (for XMLUI). The error message should be in either [dspace]/log/dspace.log OR [tomcat]/logs/.
   • For the XMLUI, you may also want to check the Cocoon logs
   (see above for path)
   • to see if any extra information can be found there. Cocoon logs can be found in these locations: 
     • DSpace 1.5.1 or previous: [tomcat]/webapps/<name-of-webapp>/WEB-INF/logs/
     • DSpace 1.5.2 or later: [dspace]/log/cocoon.log
2. If you get an "Internal Server Error" message, you will have to check the log files for a full error listing. If your email address is set up in dspace.cfg (alert.recipient) as the DSpace Administrator, you should receive an email with this full error listing. If not, move into the DSpace log directory ([dspace]/log) and view the end of the log file:
   • (Linux or Mac OSX) Go to the DSpace log directory via the command line and enter: tail -100 dspace.log Alternatively, you can open up the dspace.log file in your favorite text editor and look near the bottom of the file for the error message.
   • (Windows) Go to the DSpace log directory, and open dspace.log in your favorite text editor. Look near the bottom for the error message.
3. Usually, the culprit error is in the first five to ten lines of the error stack listing. The error stack starts with a line similar to one of the following:
   • yyyy-mm-dd time ERROR ... OR,
   • yyyy-mm-dd time WARN ...

Searching for Fixes to Common Errors

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Use the DSpace Community Resource Search engine to simultaneously search the DSpace Wiki, Issue Tracker and mailing lists (via Google).Search StackOverflow (especially the "dspace" tag) to see if this issue has been reported and solved there (as we now encourage technical questions to be asked on StackOverflow).

• Directly search or browse all DSpace mailing lists via Nabble: http://dspace.2283337.n4.nabble.com/
• Directly search or browse the DSpace Issue Tracker for known/fixed bugs: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues and https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues

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See "Report the Error and Describe How You Encountered It" section immediately above for details.

Turning on Debugging (optional)

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