Debugging MediaWiki extensions

Recently while updating the Auth_PHPBB MediaWiki extension I encountered some frustration debugging some issues happening on extension load. Here are some things that helped me track down the problem.

First, it’s useful to enable one or more debug flags in LocalSettings.php:

// Debugging
if (true) {
    // Show exceptions and DB backtraces
    $wgShowExceptionDetails = true;
    $wgShowDBErrorBacktrace = true;

    // Write out MediaWiki debug log messages
    $wgDebugLogFile = "/tmp/mw-debug.log";

    // And/or route specific log groups to individual files
    $wgDebugLogGroups = [
        "Auth_phpBB" => "/tmp/mw-debug-Auth_phpBB.log",
        "PluggableAuth" => "/tmp/mw-debug-PluggableAuth.log",
    ];

    // Disable ALL caching with the following two lines
    $wgEnableParserCache = false;
    $wgCachePages = false;
}

Enabling the full MediaWiki debug log file was the most helpful for debugging the extension as in some failure scenarios the server doesn’t return any content to the client. This was particularly frustrating since I expected such failures to output something in the PHP error log, but no. The PHP error log is also a very useful place to look for other failure scenarios though.

Remember to disable any debugging flags after you’re done with development and delete any debugging output files that were created!