Developers know that debugging a system can be quite challenging sometimes if you don’t have the tools to help you. Joomla, however, does have the tool for the job and it’s called “Debug System”. It is a plugin coupled with an option in Joomla’s Global Configuration to turn it on or off.
With Joomla’s Debug System you can see useful session information, database queries, log messages and more. In this tutorial we’re going to see how to enable it and once it’s enabled, where you can see it.
How to put Joomla in Debug Mode
First things first, we have to enable the plugin called “System - Debug”. Follow the steps below to see how to do that.
Login to your administrator panel and navigate to Extensions > Plugins
Then type “debug” in the searchbox to narrow down the results. As you can see in the screenshot below, if you click on the icon next to the plugin’s name you can immediately enable it.
Now that we have enabled the plugin all that’s left to do is to activate the debug system through Joomla’s Global Configuration.
To do that first go to Joomla’s Global Configuration by navigating to System > Global Configuration
Then you need to click the System Tab to find the Debug Settings at the middle of your screen.
All that’s left now is to click “Yes” for the “Debug System” option and then click “Save”.
Now there will be an extra footer on every page of your Joomla website for both frontend and backend which holds all kinds of useful information for your debugging purposes
How to enable Joomla Debug for Super Users only
There can be occasions in which you need to debug your website while it is live. Although you don’t want the debug information to show up for all the users of the website of course. The ideal case is for them to show up only for you, the Super User.
Joomla also offers this flexible setting and now we’ll see how to do that.
First you need to navigate to the “System - Debug” Plugin the same way we showed you previously.
Then, once you are in the plugin’s main screen, click the “Access” selectbox at the right end of your screen to reveal a dropdown of Joomla’s basic user levels and choose the last option which is “Super Users”.
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