finding out what is causing dreaded “The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.” message

Question

while doing a drupal 6 to 7 upgrade I am getting the not so helpful message \"The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.\" everytime I go to certa

Answer 1

If dlog/watchdog and php error log aren't working, try this:

go on /includes/error.inc comment line line 245

print theme('maintenance_page', array('content' => t('The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.')));

and put this

print theme('maintenance_page', array('content' => t('The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.'.$fatal.' '.var_export($error,true))));

Very similar, you put var_export($error,true)) at end of error

Answer 2

By clearing the logs at /admin/reports/dblog then reloading the broken page I easily could identify the offending module when I rechecked the log.

Site is working fine now : )

Answer 3

In Drupal 8.7 you can do this in core/lib/Drupal/Core/EventSubscriber/FinalExceptionSubscriber.php line 126:

$content = $this->t('The website encountered an  error. Please try again later.' . var_dump($error));

Answer 4

You definitely should be disabling all contrib modules to perform the upgrade. Then enable them a few at a time after they have been replaced with the D7 version. When replacing the module, be sure to clean out the entire module directory, just in case some old files remain.

This should help narrow down the problem and be sure to check the php error log in case you find something there. (Although that is usually in the case of the White Screen Of Death.)

Answer 5

As gyozo mentioned if you are not able to log into the site, then it might be difficult to debug.

Then probably you could try

1. Log into database and run delete from watchdog;
2. Refresh the page
3. Then execute the database query select variables from watchdog;
4. Look out for the text near message

Answer 6

Am replying on 8 years old thread. But wanted to share my inputs to fix this error. I am using Drupal 8.*

I faced the same error when I tried to clear the cache (From performance). I tried several things mentioned in most of the blogs or drupal help.

In the end I came to know that, there was some YML formatting issue in my Drupal 8 theme files. I removed tabs and validated my YML files from online YML validator.