This page is geared towards a system administrator; it mainly lists out the various places to look for issues.

General information:

• Koha is a web-based application, made mainly in perl.
• It uses cgi scripts.
• It uses mysql as a back-end for much of the data.
• It uses zebra to index and retrieve the marc data

Configuration Files

The main configuration file is usually found in /etc/koha/koha-config.xml. This configures koha and zebra.

You will also have some apache config files, stored somewhere like:

  /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/koha  (Debian / Ubuntu)
 /etc/httpd/conf.d/koha.conf (Centos/Redhat)

You will also have the mysql config file.

The apache config files will define where the apache logs go.

The koha xml file will define where some of the other log files and configuration files are.

Log files:

Apache error.log (location defined in the apache config file)  The standard error file will often contain error messages.

Apache access.log The access log file sometimes has information, but often the access information is in the virtual-hosts access file, not the general access file.

Koha koha-error_log (location defined in the koha config xml file, usually in /var/log/koha) Contains minor html errors. If Koha is badly broken, the errors will show up in the apache error logs. If Koha is mainly working, koha saves some of the messages here.

koha-opac-error_log Minor html error logs

koha-opac-access.log Minor html error logs

koha-zebradaemon.err This log contains a lot of good information if Zebra is breaking. If you have file permission errors or have the wrong /lib or /lib64, you will usually see some breakage logged in this file.

koha-zebradaemon-output.log This will tell you if you have a number of issues in your koha / zebra config.

Increasing Log Levels

A quick way to increase debugging information if you are getting errors on a specific page (a search, or something) is to modify the URL to add: debug=1. If you do not have any parameters being passed, add:?debug=1 http://MyKohaSite.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?debug=1 If you have parameters, add &debug=1 http://MyKohaSite.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=&q=theology&debug=1 The increased logging from that will show up in either the apache error log file or in the koha log file.

zebra debugging

Zebra is the search-engine that handles books.  If your problems seem to lie with book-searching, indexing, and the like, look to Zebra.