Faultline – Error Log Assistant

Description

Faultline turns your WordPress error log into answers: what broke, which plugin or theme caused it, and what to do next.

If you have ever turned on WP_DEBUG, found an error in the log, and had no idea which plugin caused it or what to do about it, this plugin is for you.

Find the cause

• Caused by – every error is matched to the plugin or theme behind it, with a link to that plugin’s WordPress.org support forum.
• Source code – open the file at the exact line that failed, highlighted.
• Draft forum post – a ready-to-post support request with the error and your site details filled in, and private details removed.
• Ask AI – open a copy of the error, private details removed, in Claude, ChatGPT or Perplexity. See “External services” below.

Know when something breaks

• Fatal error alerts – a banner in your dashboard, an email, or both, as soon as a fatal error happens. The alert says where it happened: the front end, the admin, a scheduled task, WP-CLI or an AJAX call, and on which page.
• Public access check – debug.log often sits where anyone can download it, and it contains server paths and plugin details. Faultline tests this the way a stranger would. If your log is exposed, one click moves it to a private file name that bots cannot guess, keeping every entry, and you get the blocking rule for your web server (Apache, LiteSpeed, nginx or IIS).

Keep the log readable

• Stop routine messages being written – notices, deprecation warnings and coding-standard suggestions never reach the log, so there is nothing to clean up later. Other debugging tools still see every error. An optional setting loads Faultline before your other plugins, so the notices they raise while starting up are caught too.
• Ignore patterns – hide one chatty message without hiding its whole category. A live preview shows what will match before you save.
• Automatic cleanup – remove noise, delete old entries and cap the file size, so a runaway error never fills your disk.
• Fatal errors are always logged. They cannot be switched off.

Private details stay private

Ask AI links and forum drafts replace server paths, your domain, the database table prefix, email addresses and IP addresses with placeholders before the text leaves your browser. Nothing is sent automatically: you always see the text first.

Guided setup

Setup takes a few minutes, one short screen at a time:

• Previous logs – finds PHP error logs your site was already writing (such as error_log or php_error.log) and copies their recent entries into the new log. The original files are only read, never changed.
• Turn on logging – WordPress needs three settings in wp-config.php (WP_DEBUG, WP_DEBUG_LOG and WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY) to log errors without showing them to visitors. Setup checks all three and can make the change for you, with a backup first and a one-click restore.
• Reduce noise and Alerts – sensible defaults, already selected.
• Done – confirms that logging works and that your log cannot be downloaded from the web.

Nothing is removed from an existing log until you finish or skip setup. You can run it again from the Status tab.

What Faultline will never do

• Write to .htaccess. One bad rule there can take the whole site down, so you get the rule to add yourself.
• Change wp-config.php without asking. It adds the lines that are missing. It changes an existing line in only two cases, each confirmed by you: correcting a single wrong true/false value, and giving the log a private file name. If a setting is defined more than once, it explains the problem instead of guessing. A backup is taken before every change.
• Hide a fatal error. Fatal errors, parse errors and uncaught exceptions are always logged.

External services

Faultline can show “Ask AI” links next to each log entry. Links to Claude and ChatGPT are shown by default. Choose which links appear, or turn them all off, under Settings > Troubleshooting links.

When you click one of these links, your browser opens that service’s website in a new tab, with a copy of the log entry in the page’s URL. Faultline itself sends nothing to these services. There is no server-side request, and nothing is sent until you click a link. Before the link is built, your browser removes server paths, your domain, the table prefix, email addresses and IP addresses from the entry. This is a best-effort pattern match and cannot catch every sensitive detail, such as an order ID or a customer name inside an error message.

The services these links can point to:

• Claude (Anthropic) – Terms of Service, Privacy Policy
• ChatGPT (OpenAI) – Terms of Use, Privacy Policy
• Perplexity – Terms of Service, Privacy Policy

No service is contacted unless you click its link.