As a Zurmo CRM administrator it’s imperative that you can locate and review the logs in order to troubleshoot potential access problems and any runtime errors. Today we are going to explain how to access the Zurmo logs when your instance is hosted at Arvixe on a personal Linux hosting plan.

As a prerequisite, you will need to contact customer support at Arvixe and request shell ssh access.

The next step is to obtain and configure a terminal emulator. I use and recommend PuTTY which can be obtained from www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html‎

There are complete and thorough instructions on how to install PuTTY for various operating systems on the website. For now, you only need to download the putty.exe executable which when extracted to the desktop on a windows machine will create a shortcut that will appear like this:

When you click on the shortcut, PuTTY will start and present you with a screen that looks similar to this:

You can type your full domain name in Host Name field, and leave all of the other defaults.

When you click Open, you will get a terminal where you can log in with your hosting credentials. I’m not going to post the terminal window here for basic security reasons, but I’ll describe the next few steps in which we will be using simple linux commands to navigate and view the logs.

From the terminal prompt at your home directory, use the ‘cd’ command to change directory to access-logs. For those readers familiar with Linux, access-logs is a symbolic link to the webserver log directory.

cd access-logs

Here you will see an access log file named something like yourdomain.com. You can use the Linux ‘tail’ command to inspect the last few lines of each file. Use the -f option to leave the tail running in continuous mode and you can see real time access attempts to your logs.

tail -f yourdomain.com

Zurmo also posts certain errors in a file called application.log.  If you are using a standard Arvixe Softaculous install, here is how to locate and tail the runtime application log.

# go to home directory
cd ~

# go to zurmo runtime directory
cd www/zurmo/app/protected/runtime

# view the last few lines of the runtime log
tail -f application.log

It’s important to know that there may not be an application.log file in the runtime directory if there have been no errors, warnings or info messages appended to the log.

In a future article we’ll be learning about the other files in the runtime directory.

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