When trying to debug issues with FTP connections, it’s very useful to know what an FTP client is doing under the hood. FileZilla is a very popular FTP client which can provide fairly detailed information about it’s connections.
This article explains how to get this information.
Enable debug logging
To enable debug logging in FileZilla, you’ll need to do the following:
- Go to Edit → Settings…
- Scroll down to the Debug page.
- Ensure that “Show debug menu” is enabled (it is by default).
- Update the “Debug information in message log” and set it to “2 - Info”.
- Click Save to update the settings.
Retry the action and gather the logs
With debug logging enabled, you should try to retry your FTP action.
You’ll see that the box at the top of the screen will fill with lots of text. This is the debug output of FileZilla.
To provide the most useful information, you can copy all the information from this box and post it somewhere to share. FileZilla hides sensitive details like passwords by default, so all the information there is safe to share.