Eldump

Eldump is a client-side and ASP.NET solution for downloading all errors logged at a web site using ELMAH.

Client-Side

Eldump is a console application (written in F#) that can download all errors logged at a web site using ELMAH. Each error downloaded is dumped as a stand-alone XML file. It does not matter what backing store ELMAH is using on the web site. It also does not matter what version of ELMAH is being used.

All you need to dump out the errors is the URL you usually use to visit the first page of logged error in ELMAH. The simplest usage is therefore:

eldump http://www.example.com/elmah.axd

Optionally, you can also specify an output directory like this:

eldump http://www.example.com/elmah.axd --output-dir %temp%\errors

Eldump needs HTTP GET and HEAD permissions to the ELMAH handler URL to work.

Server-Side

Eldump is an ASP.NET HTTP handler that takes all the errors in an ELMAH error log and compresses them into a ZIP archive for downloading.

Eldump can be deployed into the bin folder of a running ASP.NET web application and enabled via configuration, without the need for any changes to the application code. Just add the following to the web.config of the ASP.NET application (changing the path as you like):

<location path="eldump.axd">  
    <system.web>
        <httpHandlers>
            <add verb="GET,HEAD" 
                 path="eldump.axd" 
                 type="Eldump.AspNet.ErrorLogArchiveHandler, Eldump.AspNet" />
        </httpHandlers>
        <authorization>
            <deny users="*" />  
        </authorization>  
    </system.web>
    <system.webServer>
        <handlers>
            <add name="ELMAH" 
                 verb="GET,HEAD"
                 path="eldump.axd" 
                 type="Eldump.AspNet.ErrorLogArchiveHandler, Eldump.AspNet"
                 preCondition="integratedMode" />
        </handlers>
    </system.webServer>
</location>  

As an alternative to the above, Eldump can also register itself automatically by simply adding the following entry to the appSettings:

<add key="eldump:enabled" value="true" />

With auto-registration, Eldump will respond to any URL with eldump or eldump.axd as a path component. It will also forbid unauthenticated requests. You can change these defaults by setting a delegate to the ErrorLogArchiveHandler.RequestPredicate static property during application initialization and which will determine under which request conditions Eldump's handler will respond.

Once deployed, a ZIP of the error log can be downloaded by simply visiting the configured path under the web application root. For example, if the web application is hosted at http://www.example.com/ and the handler is configured to respond to the path eldump.axd as shown above, then the URL to generate the error log archive would be http://www.example.com/eldump.axd.