Crash dump

NOTE: some content in this wiki applies only to 0.12 and earlier versions. For official documentation on 0.13 and later, see http://docs.nwjs.io

Since 0.8.0 crash dump is supported. It means if node-webkit crashed, a minidump file will be saved. Users can include it in the bug report. It would be helpful to find out what's wrong with node-webkit in certain cases. Ideally node-webkit should not crash in all cases.

Crash dumping is enabled on all the 3 platforms and the minidump file will be saved in the following default directories:

• Linux: /tmp
• Windows: System temporary directory
• Mac: ~/Library/Breakpad/product name (product name is defined in .plist file in the application bundle)

On some systems you need to ensure the directory exists (aka create the directory manually) to get dumps created

The dump location can be changed by an API:

var gui = require('nw.gui');
gui.App.setCrashDumpDir(dir);

Note that if the program crashes before setting the new location, the dump file will still be saved in the default location.

Decoding the stack trace

To extract the stack trace from the minidump file, you need the minidump_stackwalk tool, symbols file of node-webkit binary and the minidump (.dmp) file generated from the crash.

See http://www.chromium.org/developers/decoding-crash-dumps

http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/wiki/GettingStartedWithBreakpad

Symbols file of official node-webkit binary is provided staring from 0.8.0. It can be downloaded from:

https://dl.nwjs.io/

You can also try a Node.js implemented tool from the community: @licq/nwjs-minidump.

Trigger the crash for testing

To test the crash dump feature, 2 API functions are added in 0.8.0 to trigger the crash on purpose: App.crashBrowser() and App.crashRenderer(). They crash the browser process and the renderer process respectively.

Resources

You can always find the links to symbols in the release notes of every version.
Linux symbol files of breakpad

https://s3.amazonaws.com/node-webkit/v0.8.0/nw.breakpad.ia32.gz

https://s3.amazonaws.com/node-webkit/v0.8.0/nw.breakpad.x64.gz

windows pdb file

https://s3.amazonaws.com/node-webkit/v0.8.0/nw.exe.pdb.zip

mac dSYM files

https://s3.amazonaws.com/node-webkit/v0.8.0/node-webkit-osx-dsym-v0.8.0.tar.gz