Crash Snapshot Lite

Crash Snapshot Lite – Free Production Error Capture for PrestaShop 9

Crash Snapshot Lite is a free PrestaShop 9 diagnostics module for capturing supported application-level PHP, Symfony and PrestaShop errors in production without turning the storefront into a full debug screen. It stores a sanitized incident snapshot in the Back Office so a random error can be investigated after it happens.

Capture application errors without enabling full debug

After the Crash Snapshot runtime has loaded, supported exceptions can be captured automatically. Fatal and shutdown errors use a private file-spool fallback first, then a normal request or the maintenance cron can import those incidents into the database.

See the information needed to investigate

Each incident can contain a sanitized error message, error or exception type, file and line, safe stack trace, Front Office / Back Office / API context, request information and environment details such as PrestaShop version, PHP version, theme, shop ID and memory usage.

Protect sensitive request data

Crash Snapshot is intentionally conservative about captured data. Known secrets, cookies, authorization headers, raw request bodies and stack arguments are not stored by default. A privacy scrubber also removes sensitive values from diagnostic strings before they are saved.

Group repeated failures by fingerprint

Repeated occurrences of the same problem are grouped under one incident fingerprint. Instead of filling the dashboard with duplicate rows, Crash Snapshot increases the occurrence counter and updates the last-seen time.

Back Office incident workflow

• Search incidents by incident code, message, file or route.
• Filter by Front Office, Back Office or API context.
• Filter by reviewed / unreviewed status and basic diagnostic fields.
• Open a detailed incident view with sanitized diagnostics.
• Copy a diagnostic snapshot for troubleshooting.
• Mark incidents as reviewed or delete individual incidents.
• Use shop-scoped incident views in multistore environments.

Built-in capture health and safe self-test

The diagnostics panel checks the exception listener, shutdown handler, private spool directory, database storage, privacy scrubber and retention cleanup. A safe self-test intentionally creates clearly marked synthetic incidents so the capture pipeline, spool import and privacy scrubbing can be verified.

Maintenance cron for predictable fatal-spool processing

A private tokenized cron URL is generated by the module. Running it approximately every five minutes imports fatal/shutdown incidents from the private spool and performs retention cleanup. Normal application exceptions are stored immediately when the database is available, so the cron does not scan normal shop traffic for errors.

What is intentionally not included in Lite?

Lite does not try to identify the most likely module, theme or database source, correlate an incident with recent module/cache changes, classify SQLSTATE details, create downloadable support bundles or send email/webhook alerts. Those workflows are reserved for Crash Snapshot Pro.

Compatibility and important limitations

• Designed for PrestaShop 9.
• Requires PHP 8.1+.
• No PrestaShop core override is used.
• Captured incidents are application-level diagnostics, not a replacement for web-server, PHP-FPM or operating-system logs.
• Errors that happen before PHP/PrestaShop/module bootstrap, hard PHP-FPM crashes, OS out-of-memory kills and upstream 502/503 failures may occur before Crash Snapshot can capture them.
• Uninstall keeps captured incident data; destructive purge is a separate explicit action.

Frequently asked questions

Will Crash Snapshot catch every HTTP 500?

No. It captures supported application-level failures after its runtime has loaded. A failure that happens before PrestaShop or the module starts cannot be guaranteed to appear in Crash Snapshot.

Does it store passwords, cookies or request bodies?

Known secrets, cookies, authorization headers, raw request bodies and stack arguments are not stored by default. The privacy scrubber also sanitizes diagnostic strings before storage.

Why does the module have a cron URL?

The cron is a maintenance path. It imports fatal/shutdown incidents that were first written to the private spool and runs retention cleanup. It does not crawl normal pages looking for errors.

Can I move from Lite to Pro later?

Yes. Lite and Pro use the same Crash Snapshot incident storage model. Pro extends the diagnostic schema and becomes the active edition without requiring a separate incident history.