Quick Elmah setup

Elmah is great. Its an error logging utility that you can drop into a .net app without changing any code. You just drop the DLL in the bin folder, and make a few web.config changes. OK, these days you can achieve the same thing with ASP.NET Health Monitoring, but Elmah is nice and easy, and the web pages it provides to inspect the error log are cool.

There are loads of different ways of configuring Elmah (you can get it email errors to you, for example) and the 'demo' that comes with the download shows most of the options. But in most cases you'll want bog-standard logging to a local db, so these notes cover doing that.

1. Download Elmah

Download from here.

2. Drop DLLs into Bin folder

Unpack the download and look for the appropriate bin folder, usually you'll want the Release version of .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.5. From that bin folder, copy the Elmah.dll and the SQLLite.dll to the Bin folder for your web app.

E.g, these two files:

ELMAH-1.1-bin\bin\net-2.0\Release\Elmah.dll
ELMAH-1.1-bin\bin\net-2.0\Release\System.Data.SQLite.dll

3. Add things to your web.config

Copy the bold sections below into the right places in your web.config:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <configSections>
    ... 
    <sectionGroup name="elmah">
      <section name="security" requirePermission="false" type="Elmah.SecuritySectionHandler, Elmah"/>
      <section name="errorLog" requirePermission="false" type="Elmah.ErrorLogSectionHandler, Elmah"/>
    </sectionGroup>  </configSections>
  ...
  <elmah>
    <errorLog type="Elmah.SQLiteErrorLog, Elmah" connectionStringName="ELMAH.SQLite" />
    <security allowRemoteAccess="0" />
  </elmah>
  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="ELMAH.SQLite" connectionString="Data Source=|DataDirectory|errors.s3db"/>
    ...
  </connectionStrings>
  <system.web>
    ...
    <httpHandlers>
      ... 
      <add verb="POST,GET,HEAD" path="elmah.axd" type="Elmah.ErrorLogPageFactory, Elmah"/>
    </httpHandlers>
    <httpModules>
      ...
      <add name="ErrorLog" type="Elmah.ErrorLogModule, Elmah"/>
      <add name="ErrorFilter" type="Elmah.ErrorFilterModule, Elmah"/>
    </httpModules>
    ...
  </system.web>
  <system.webServer>
    <modules>
      ..
      <add name="ErrorLog" type="Elmah.ErrorLogModule, Elmah" preCondition="managedHandler" />
      <add name="ErrorFilter" type="Elmah.ErrorFilterModule, Elmah" preCondition="managedHandler" />
    </modules>
    <handlers>
      ...
      <add name="Elmah" path="elmah.axd" verb="POST,GET,HEAD"
        type="Elmah.ErrorLogPageFactory, Elmah" preCondition="integratedMode" />
    </handlers>
  </system.webServer>
  ...
</configuration>

4. Off it goes!

Thats it, really. Elmah will now catch and log all unhandled Exceptions.

If you now run your web app, and on the web server browse to:

http://localhost/YourAppName/Elmah.axd

... you will see the Elmah error log.

Note that the config settings given above ensure that viewing the error log is only accessible from the web server itself.

If you want to manually log errors, for example Exceptions that you have caught in a try..catch block, then you can use code like this:

catch (Exception e)
{
  Elmah.ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(e);
  ...
}

(If you are using an ASP.NET Web Application Project, you'll also need to add a reference to Elmah.dll to be able to access Elmah in code)