Logging

The app writes a file log so issues invisible in the TUI (full error text, URLs, statuses, content-types) are recorded and can be shared.

Location

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/moviebox-tui/logs/
• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\moviebox-tui\logs\
• Linux: $XDG_DATA_HOME/moviebox-tui/logs/ (else ~/.local/share/moviebox-tui/logs/)

The active file is moviebox-tui_rCURRENT.log; rotated files are moviebox-tui_r00000.log, ….

Behavior

• Level is controlled by MOVIEBOX_LOG (off|error|warn|info|debug|trace). Default is info across all builds (warn and error lines are always included).
• Rotation: rotates at 5MB and keeps 3 files.
• Terminal output: normal log lines write only to the log file and never touch stdout or stderr, which keeps the screen clean before entering alternate screen mode. Setup errors (if any) are reported on stderr.
• Session header: version, OS, and the log path are written on startup.
• Panics: the panic hook captures stack backtraces, logs the payload and backtrace to the file, flushes log buffers, and then restores the terminal.
• --version and --help never create a log file.

What is logged

• error: hard failures (all-hosts exhausted, resolve failures, player spawn/crash, download failures, panics) and every Error: status the UI shows.
• warn: recoverable issues (mirror rejected, subtitle unavailable, cache write failed, GitHub rate limit).
• info: session start, playable mirror found, playback launch.
• debug: full request context (enable with MOVIEBOX_LOG=debug).

Privacy / sharing

Logs are sanitized so they can be pasted into a GitHub issue:

• URLs are reduced to scheme://host (file tokens, filenames, and query params are removed).
• Absolute paths are rewritten to ~ so your username does not appear.
• Headers, Authorization, search queries, and watch history are never logged.

Reproduce the problem, then attach the current log file. See debugging.md.