Getting debugging info out of BitlBee

First of all, ignore the debug setting. It's useless. It should probably be removed.

Debugging crashes

See DebuggingCrashes

Getting debug logs

To get debug output, you have to launch BitlBee by hand instead of from the init script, with the BITLBEE_DEBUG=1 environment variable set. Also, you should pass some flags so it won't daemonise (and close stdout, stderr, etc.).

In short, something like this:

BITLBEE_DEBUG=1 bitlbee -Dnv

This may not be very useful, as not all protocols use this method of debugging. Good luck!

Again, be careful when sharing this output on the bug tracker/pastebin/etc as it may contain your password.

A note on libpurple

With bitlbee-libpurple, you can't use daemon mode (-D), and using forkdaemon mode (-F) makes debugging difficult.

Using the BITLBEE_DEBUG=1 environment variable as mentioned in the previous section workarounds this, letting you use daemon mode with libpurple, but it will only work for the first connection from your irc client, and will abort if you try to connect more than once to the same bitlbee instace. Just restart it if you need more than one connection.

XMPP/Jabber debugging

This one's easy, and works even if you're on a public server. It won't work if you use libpurple's jabber, see the previous sections for that.

Before connecting, you can enable xmlconsole to get raw XMPP traffic in a PM window from the _xmlconsole contact:

account jabber set xmlconsole true

This will show the whole login sequence. The packet that sends the password is censored with stars.

Or, if already connected, you can add and remove the _xmlconsole contact like this:

add jabber _xmlconsole
remove _xmlconsole

Also, it will let you send raw XML to the server yourself. But be careful, if you send something invalid the server on the other end will probably disconnect you!