r/ProWordPress

I’ve been thinking about production logging in WordPress plugins lately.

During development it’s tempting to log everything because more context makes debugging easier. In production though, that gets uncomfortable pretty quickly.

Things like request payloads, webhook bodies, order IDs, user IDs, API responses and stack traces can be extremely useful when something fails, but they can also create privacy, storage and retention problems if you keep too much.

I’m curious where other plugin developers draw the line.

For example, do you:

- log full external API responses or only selected fields?
- keep business identifiers like order IDs in logs?
- redact emails, names and payment-related data by default?
- use different retention periods for debug logs vs audit/history data?
- let merchants enable verbose logging temporarily?
- automatically delete old logs?

I’m especially interested in plugins where failures may only become visible hours or days later, so having enough context to reconstruct what happened actually matters.

What has worked well for you in production without turning the log table into a second database?

I'm a plugin author, and have some users who want to use Git Updater rather than the w.org repo to update my stuff.

I'm looking for some "here's what you do, plugin author" documentation on this, and I'm coming up short.

Reading between the lines of the Git Updater documentation, it looks to me like installing a plugin with Git Updater copies the entire contents of the Primary branch: whatever header it finds in the main plugin file (or theme style.css).

And updating it compares the Version: 1.2.3 headers in the presently installed plugin and the Github (or Gitlab &c) repo.

It looks like Git Updater, unlike the w.org repo svn setup, doesn't use the Version 1.2.3 header to decide which tagged version to install. And unlike 10up's CI workflows, it looks like Git Updater doesn't honor .distignore, so it pulls unit tests and other build-time assets as well as runtime.

Is there a commonly accepted way of setting up for Git Update? Does anybody have any guidelines for that? Ideally, it would do more-or-less what the w.org repo does with tags. But I'll be happy with any convention that lots of people follow.

Thanks.