Unable to turn off / disable debug.log

[Yonezpt]

Supposedly the debug.log file should no longer be created by default since 9a4562b

However it keeps creating a debug.log file whenever the app runs. I already tried "chromium-args": "disable-logging" and "chromium-args": "--disable-logging" but the debug.log file keeps being generated.

I've only noticed this file because it was reaching an extremely large size. While I can delete it myself periodically or perhaps even create a routine to do it, this is not an ideal behavior for end users.

I did test this with the Normal NWJS version expecting this to be linked to SDK, but the behavior still stands.

Either the debug.log should be disabled unless the user adds the flag to enable it or the opposite, either way as it currently stands the debug.log file cannot be disabled by any means.

NWJS Normal: v0.13.1
OS: Win7x64

[Yonezpt]

Looks like this problem returned/is present in current NWJS 0.14.0 rc2, probably a regression or perhaps the current fix in 13 was never applied to 14.

[rogerwang]

The fix was merged to the branch for 0.14 after 0.14.0-rc2. It's in the nightly build:

http://dl.nwjs.io/live-build/04-07-2016/9e26cf8-4903036-1df60de-98bfcac

[Yonezpt]

Glad to hear that, I wasn't aware of rc3 yet.

[Yonezpt]

On Win7x64 sdk0.13.3 and sdk0.14.0rc3 the issue appears to be mostly fixed so far, but error messages are still going through to the debug log and only error messages, nothing else.

The one I keep receiving is as follows:

[0407/223545:ERROR:image_metadata_extractor.cc(114)] Couldn't load libexif. 126

It is spontaneous and I haven't yet manged to find a way to replicate it for a reproducible case. Don't know if error messages are supose to ignore logging by design, but if they are then this is working as it is suppose to.

[rogerwang]

@ghostoy please check the error msg case. debug.log in the binary directory should be able to turn off completely. It should behave as https://www.chromium.org/for-testers/enable-logging

[ghostoy]

@rogerwang This logging is because of decoding corrupted image file, for example bad icon provided in package.json. We can ship libexif to prevent logging just like Chrome.

But libexif is deprecated in latest Chromium upstream. See https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/cd96b6f874573d7089bf2eb9d54ed53d7469bb56.

[rogerwang]

why the log goes to debug.log, not chrome_debug.log in user data dir?

[ghostoy]

Every log message created by LOG(severity) will be output to g_log_file_name if g_logging_destination contains LOG_TO_FILE flag.

It happens on Windows only because g_logging_destination is initialized to LOG_TO_FILE on Windows, but set to LOG_TO_SYSTEM_DEBUG_LOG on other OSes (see https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src/blob/nw13/base/logging.h#L158-L160). Then g_log_file_name will be initialized to debug.log on the side of nw.exe. If the log file creation fails, it will try to create debug.log in current directory.

We can try to init g_logging_destination to LOG_TO_SYSTEM_DEBUG_LOG on Windows. This will fix this issue completely, but there may be some side effects we don't know.

[rogerwang]

This is fixed in git and will be available in the next nightly build.