[Support Guide] Using build logs to debug your build process

Last reviewed by Netlify Support - August, 2023

Congratulations on using Netlify to build and deploy your project! Netlify is designed to be stable, reliable, and easy to use, but sometimes people do get errors when building their projects.

When you build on Netlify we produce and display a log of your build. If your build fails on Netlify (but does build locally - always, always check that first!), visiting your log should be the next step in the debugging process. Our logs can contain super-helpful messages about why a build has failed.

To find your build logs, go to your Netlify dashboard for your site. At the top, you’ll see a link for Deploys. Clicking that bring you to a page of deploys - one for every build you’ve created. Clicking on a deploy brings you to the deploy log.

Let’s look at an example, here is the log of a failed build:

Look at the lines in the red box. This is an error, and it indicates your build is missing a package.json file at '/opt/build/repo/package.json'.

If you get stuck debugging a build error message, or don’t even know where to start, try looking through our forums to see if people have already dealt with the same error. You should also try searching through the Netlify Docs. If that doesn’t help, try doing a quick Google search on the error in your log. This is especially true if you use the open source tools such as npm, ruby, linux, and others - just because you are seeing an error while building on Netlify, it doesn’t necessarily mean its a Netlify bug.

If you are still stuck, create a new forums post referencing the specific error that you are seeing, as well as steps you’ve taken to resolve the issue, and your Netlify user name.emphasized text

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