Symbolicating iPhone App Crash Reports

Question

I'm looking to try and symbolicate my iPhone app's crash reports.

I retrieved the crash reports from iTunes Connect. I have the application binary that I submitted to the App Store and I have the dSYM file that was generated as part of the build.

I have all of these files together inside a single directory that is indexed by spotlight.

What now?

I have tried invoking:

symbolicatecrash crashreport.crash myApp.app.dSYM

and it just outputs the same text that is in the crash report to start with, not symbolicated.

Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

I got a bit grumpy about the fact nothing here seems to "just work" so I did some investigating and the result is:

Set up: QuincyKit back end that receives reports. No symbolication set up as I couldn't even begin to figure out what they were suggesting I do to make it work.

The fix: download crash reports from the server online. They're called 'crash' and by default go into the ~/Downloads/ folder. With that in mind, this script will "do the right thing" and the crash reports will go into Xcode (Organizer, device logs) and symbolication will be done.

The script:

#!/bin/bash
# Copy crash reports so that they appear in device logs in Organizer in Xcode

if [ ! -e ~/Downloads/crash ]; then 
   echo "Download a crash report and save it as $HOME/Downloads/crash before running this script."
   exit 1
fi

cd ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/
mkdir -p actx # add crash report to xcode abbreviated
cd actx

datestr=`date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S"`

mv ~/Downloads/crash "actx-app_"$datestr"_actx.crash"

Things can be automated to where you can drag and drop in Xcode Organizer by doing two things if you do use QuincyKit/PLCR.

Firstly, you have to edit the remote script admin/actionapi.php ~line 202. It doesn't seem to get the timestamp right, so the file ends up with the name 'crash' which Xcode doesn't recognize (it wants something dot crash):

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="crash'.$timestamp.'.crash"');

Secondly, in the iOS side in QuincyKit BWCrashReportTextFormatter.m ~line 176, change @"[TODO]" to @"TODO" to get around the bad characters.

Answer 2

After reading all these answers here in order to symbolicate a crash log (and finally succeeding) I think there are some points missing here that are really important in order to determine why the invocation of symbolicatecrash does not produce a symbolicated output.

There are 3 assets that have to fit together when symbolicating a crash log:

1. The crash log file itself (i.e. example.crash), either exported from XCode's organizer or received from iTunes Connect.
2. The .app package (i.e. example.app) that itself contains the app binary belonging to the crash log. If you have an .ipa package (i.e. example.ipa) then you can extract the .app package by unzipping the .ipa package (i.e. unzip example.ipa). Afterwards the .app package resides in the extracted Payload/ folder.
3. The .dSYM package containing the debug symbols (i.e. example.app.dSYM)

Before starting symbolication you should check if all those artifacts match, which means that the crash log belongs to the binary you have and that the debug symbols are the ones produced during the build of that binary.

Each binary is referred by a UUID that can be seen in the crash log file:

...
Binary Images:
0xe1000 -    0x1f0fff +example armv7  <aa5e633efda8346cab92b01320043dc3> /var/mobile/Applications/9FB5D11F-42C0-42CA-A336-4B99FF97708F/example.app/example
0x2febf000 - 0x2fedffff  dyld armv7s  <4047d926f58e36b98da92ab7a93a8aaf> /usr/lib/dyld
...

In this extract the crash log belongs to an app binary image named example.app/example with UUID aa5e633efda8346cab92b01320043dc3.

You can check the UUID of the binary package you have with dwarfdump:

dwarfdump --uuid example.app/example
UUID: AA5E633E-FDA8-346C-AB92-B01320043DC3 (armv7) example.app/example

Afterwards you should check if the debug symbols you have also belong to that binary:

dwarfdump --uuid example.app.dSYM
UUID: AA5E633E-FDA8-346C-AB92-B01320043DC3 (armv7) example.app.dSYM/Contents/Resources/DWARF/example

In this example all assets fit together and you should be able to symbolicate your stacktrace.

Proceeding to the symbolicatecrash script:

In Xcode 8.3 you should be able to invoke the script via

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/DVTFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resources/symbolicatecrash -v example.crash 2> symbolicate.log

If it is not there you may run a find . -name symbolicatecrash in your Xcode.app directory to find it.

As you can see there are no more parameters given. So the script has to find your application binary and debug symbols by running a spotlight search. It searches the debug symbols with a specific index called com_apple_xcode_dsym_uuids. You can do this search yourself:

mdfind 'com_apple_xcode_dsym_uuids = *'

resp.

mdfind "com_apple_xcode_dsym_uuids == AA5E633E-FDA8-346C-AB92-B01320043DC3"

The first spotlight invocation gives you all indexed dSYM packages and the second one gives you the .dSYM packages with a specific UUID. If spotlight does not find your .dSYM package then symbolicatecrash will neither. If you do all this stuff e.g. in a subfolder of your ~/Desktop spotlight should be able to find everything.

If symbolicatecrash finds your .dSYM package there should be a line like the following in symbolicate.log:

@dsym_paths = ( <SOME_PATH>/example.app.dSYM/Contents/Resources/DWARF/example )

For finding your .app package a spotlight search like the following is invoked by symbolicatecrash:

mdfind "kMDItemContentType == com.apple.application-bundle && (kMDItemAlternateNames == 'example.app' || kMDItemDisplayName == 'example' || kMDItemDisplayName == 'example.app')"

If symbolicatecrash finds your .app package there should be the following extract in symbolicate.log:

Number of symbols in <SOME_PATH>/example.app/example: 2209 + 19675 = 21884
Found executable <SOME_PATH>/example.app/example
-- MATCH

If all those resources are found by symbolicatecrash it should print out the symbolicated version of your crash log.

If not you can pass in your dSYM and .app files directly.

symbolicatecrash -v --dsym <SOME_PATH>/<App_URI>.app.dSYM/<APP_NAME>.app.dsym <CRASHFILE> <SOME_OTHER_PATH>/<APP_NAME>.app/<APP_NAME> > symbolicate.log

Note: The symbolicated backtrace will be output to terminal, not symbolicate.log.

Answer 3

Just a simple and updated answer for xcode 6.1.1 .

STEPS

1.Xcode>Window>Devices.

2.Select a device from a list of devices under DEVICES section.

3.Select View Device Logs.

4.Under the All Logs section you can directly drag drop the report.crash

5.Xcode will automatically Symbolicate the crash report for you.

6.You can find the Symbolicated crash report by matching its Date/Time with the Date/Time mentioned in your crash report.

Answer 4

In XCode 4.2.1, open Organizer, then go to Library/Device Logs and drag your .crash file into the list of crash logs. It will be symbolicated for you after a few seconds. Note that you must use the same instance of XCode that the original build was archived on (i.e. the archive for your build must exist in Organizer).

Answer 5

The combination that worked for me was:

1. Copy the dSYM file into the directory where the crash report was
2. Unzip the ipa file containing the app ('unzip MyApp.ipa')
3. Copy the application binary from the resulting exploded payload into the same folder as the crash report and symbol file (Something like "MyApp.app/MyApp")
4. Import or Re-symbolicate the crash report from within XCode's organizer

Using atos I wasn't able to resolve the correct symbol information with the addresses and offsets that were in the crash report. When I did this, I see something more meaningful, and it seems to be a legitimate stack trace.

Answer 6

I found out most of proposed alternatives did not work in latest XCode (tested with Xcode 10). For example, I had no luck drag-dropping .crash logs in Xcode -> Organizer -> Device logs -view.

I recommend using Symbolicator tool https://github.com/agentsim/Symbolicator

• Git clone Symbolicator repository and compile and run with Xcode
• Copy .crash file (ascii file, with stack trace in begging of file) and .xarchive of crashing release to same temporarly folder
• Drag and drop .crash file to Symbolicator icon in Dock
• In 5-30 secs symbolicated crash file is produced in same folder as .crash and .xarchive are