Logging Magento’s Controller Dispatch

I'm taking a quick break from the Magento series as I plumb the depth of EAV and get through a crunch phase at The Day Job™. In the selfless interest of helping out the internet and the selfish interest of keeping my front page free of moldy content, I thought I'd pass on a simple Controller dispatch logging patch for Magento. This is mainly useful when you're setting up a new Module and can't figure out why Magento won't see it, or if Magento keeps throwing the CMS 404 page in your face

A Few Caveats

1. These files are not a true Magento Module. While powerful, creating something like this with Magento's override system would be an order of magnitude harder
2. Because of the above, I can't make any promises about using this with a anything but Magento version 1.3.2.3
3. Standard caveats about production servers apply. Use at your own risk, no warranties, etc.

Installing

Take the "Mage" folder (1.3.2.3/Mage) and place it in

app/code/local 

so that your directory tree looks like

local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Action.php local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Router/Standard.php local/Mage/Core/Model/App.php 

Then, enable logging and you should start seeing messages in your system.log that look something like

2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Matching router [standard] = Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Standard  vs. request 2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Module: helloworld 2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Found Modules: Array (     [0] => Alanstormdotcom_Helloworld )  2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Setting Route Name [helloworld] on request 2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Passing request into controller Alanstormdotcom_Helloworld_IndexController 2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Setting Module Name to: helloworld at Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Standard::match(248) 2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Setting Controller Name to: index at Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Standard::match(250) 2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Setting Action Name to: index at Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Standard::match(252) 2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Calling dispatch method on Alanstormdotcom_Helloworld_IndexController 2009-09-20T16:55:48+00:00 DEBUG (7): Action Controller: Alanstormdotcom_Helloworld_IndexController dispatching with action [index] 

You'll also see a message whenever Magento can't make a Module, Controller, or Action Method match, which is useful when debugging 404 problems.