WP Debug Robot

Have you ever wanted to get debug output sent to you from WordPress without interrupting the flow of the page?
Do you ever wish you could get debug output from other users’ sessions so you don’t have to:

• Log in as them
• Asking them to look at debug output themselves (bleh)
• Or try in vain to re-create their issue

This plugin allows you to send debug messages via UDP to a Jabber Bot that can then route
the debug information to your IM client.

Note: This plugin sends the messages via UDP. The receiving end doesn’t necessarily need to be a Jabber bot…it could be anything you want
(e.g. email bot, logger, whatever). My implementation is a Jabber Bot on my local dev environment 🙂

Usage

To send debug messages, simply call:

do_action( 'debug_robot', $message [, $target ]);

• $message: Message to send to your jabber bot.
• $target: (optional) Email address that your jabber bot will route the message to.

To receive debug messages, you will need to have:

• Your Jabber Bot installed and configured.
• The Jabber Bot must be running.
• You must have friended your robot’s jabber account with another jabber account (e.g. your Google account).
• You must be signed into Google Talk in some way shape or form so that your jabber bot can IM you.

Note: If your Jabber Bot isn’t running, no worries. UDP doesn’t wait for a response so it won’t impact your WordPress instance…you just won’t get the messages that
are sent until your bot is running 🙂

Credits

This code was largely written by @abackstrom with some additions by me while we worked at @PlymouthState. I then ported it into a WordPress plugin.

1. Upload the wp-debug-robot folder to your plugins directory (e.g. wp-content/plugins)
2. Got to Settings > Debug Robot and configure your settings.
3. Set the host and port of the server you wish to send debug messages to.
4. Set the default target email address that debug messages will be routed to by a Jabber bot.
5. Configure a Jabber Bot

Note: you will also need a dummy jabber email address to act as your jabber bot. I created one with Google Apps called robot@mydomain.com then friended that account with my primary Google account.

You mention a jabber bot. What is that all about?

This plugin allows your WordPress installation to send UDP packets containing debug information to…some place. The jabber bot is a service that runs on a the location you configure your Debug Settings to point to. When doing development on my localhost, I can run my jabberbot on my localhost as well so my dev environment sends debug info to the same machine it is running on. Another example that I have running: There is a machine in my office with the jabberbot running at all times. My co-workers at Gigaom and me – as long as we’re on our local network – can use the jabber bot by pointing their Debug Robot settings to the machine running the bot! Super easy.

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