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Site Health false positive: WP_DEBUG_LOG warning when debug.log is outside wp-content - Ticket #64071

Open hbhalodia opened this issue 3 weeks ago • 5 comments

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64071

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Screenshot 2026-01-06 at 11 41 28 AM Screenshot 2026-01-06 at 11 42 39 AM

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hbhalodia avatar Jan 06 '26 06:01 hbhalodia

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Props hbhalodia, westonruter, mukesh27.

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github-actions[bot] avatar Jan 06 '26 06:01 github-actions[bot]

Hi Team, Can you please help review and update the wordings if needed?

Thank You,

hbhalodia avatar Jan 06 '26 06:01 hbhalodia

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github-actions[bot] avatar Jan 06 '26 06:01 github-actions[bot]

If we wanted to go the extra mile, there could be a loopback request to try to actually request the file over HTTP to see if it returns anything. This may not be helpful in the end, however, as the file may not be present if nothing has been written to the log yet. Just an idea.

Thanks @westonruter, I thought of an edge case as well, what if there is no any log file present, then realpath will return false, and since we are checking a condition out there related if both the paths are present and if that is public path, then only to consider it as the debugging log is present in public directory, else we can show what we are showing.

hbhalodia avatar Jan 08 '26 07:01 hbhalodia

I thought of an edge case as well, what if there is no any log file present, then realpath will return false, and since we are checking a condition out there related if both the paths are present and if that is public path, then only to consider it as the debugging log is present in public directory, else we can show what we are showing.

Good point. Well, in that case you could always check to see if ini_get( 'error_log' ) === WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/debug.log' in case the realpath() returns false. This will catch the default case when someone uses the default when setting WP_DEBUG_LOG to true:

https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/blob/5a53b94e89ff4276dbb235434ce8bfc99335366e/src/wp-includes/load.php#L622-L623

If, however, they do something like:

define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG`, ABSPATH . 'debug.log' );

Then checking WP_DEBUG_LOG could fail if no logs have been written yet. In that case, if realpath() returns false, then actually there isn't a need to check realpath() on the full error log. All we need to do is check the path to the directory because that's not something which would be automatically created when a new error log entry is written. So I think this can be simplified by turning $debug_log_path = realpath( $debug_log_path ); into $debug_log_path = realpath( dirname( $debug_log_path ) ) . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR;

westonruter avatar Jan 08 '26 23:01 westonruter

Hi @westonruter, Can you please take a look on these comments?

https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/10684#discussion_r2693027414, https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/10684#discussion_r2693027425, https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/10684#discussion_r2692957635

All other copilot's review have been resolved. We can land this PR if everything looks good?

hbhalodia avatar Jan 19 '26 03:01 hbhalodia