Fortress Security Part 3: Troubleshooting

Check the Fortress Error Logs

Fortress includes its own logging, and each of your websites has its own error and audit logs. These are contained here inside the /audit and /error directories:

/var/www/site.url/fortress/var/log/

You can view the error logs inside the /error directory with:

ls -l /var/www/site.url/fortress/var/log/error

From here, you can choose the most recent error log – it will be named with the date at the beginning, for example: 24-04-2023.error.log.

To view the entire log, run the following WP-CLI command (replace site.url with your website URL):

cat /var/www/site.url/fortress/var/log/error/24-04-2023.error.log

Alternatively, you can view just the last 100 lines of the log, you can use the following command:

tail -100 cat /var/www/site.url/fortress/var/log/error/24-04-2023.error.log

You can adjust “100” to be more or less, depending on your requirements.

You can learn more in the official Fortress documentation here.

Searching for Log Identifiers

If you’ve been shown an error page with an identifying number (example below), you can use grep to locate these log entries. Here, we’re searching for the phrase and displaying the line before the error number, and 10 lines after for some additional stack trace info.

Here’s an example: 

cat /var/www/site.url/fortress/var/log/error/24-04-2023.error.log | grep -B 1 -A 10 {error number}

cat /var/www/site.url/fortress/var/log/error/24-04-2023.error.log | grep -B 1 -A 10 0000000037d945ab000000004a848bb8

The output will be similar to this:

[02-Feb-2023 15:18:36 UTC] snicco_fortress.http.ERROR Can't show TOTP force-setup page to user [1] because TOTP setup is already completed.
Context: ['identifier' => '0000000037d945ab000000004a848bb8', 'user_id' => 1, 'request_target' => '/snicco-fortress/auth/totp/manage/force-setup', 'request_method' => 'GET'] 
Snicco\Component\Psr7ErrorHandler\HttpException "Can't show TOTP force-setup page to user [1] because TOTP setup is already completed." in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/snicco-fortress/src/Auth/TOTP/Infrastructure/Http/Controller/TOTPCredentialsController.php:105
Stack trace:
...