Node / meshtastic / Meshtastic-Android / files / docs / ht-rHT / user / debug-logs.md

Displaying Rendered • View raw • Download

title: Debug Logs

parent: User Guide

nav_order: 22

last_updated: 2026-08-30

description: View and export the app's own debug logs from inside the app, and attach a capture to a GitHub issue to help diagnose bugs — no adb required.

aliases:

• debug-logs

• logcat

• app-logs

• bug-report

When something misbehaves, the app's debug logs are the single most useful thing you can attach to a bug report. Meshtastic can capture them for you, from inside the app — you don't need T383838adb or any desktop tooling to collect them.

Open the Debug Panel from Settings → Advanced → Debug Panel.

If you're filing an issue, export your logs (see Exporting) and attach the T383838.txt file to your report on the Meshtastic-Android issue tracker. A log capture that covers the moment the problem happened turns "it doesn't work" into something a developer can actually track down.

The Debug Panel has two tabs:

• Packets — the decoded mesh traffic your radio has sent and received (protocol-level messages). Useful for diagnosing mesh and routing behavior.

• App logs — the app's own diagnostic log (Android logcat), including warnings, errors, and stack traces from the app itself. This is usually what a bug report needs.

Each tab has its own export button and produces its own file, so you can grab whichever is relevant — or both.

The App logs tab shows the most recent log lines from this app only — never other apps on your phone.

• Search — type in the search box to filter to matching lines.

• Level filter — the V / D / I / W / E chips toggle Verbose, Debug, Info, Warn, and Error lines. Tap a level to hide it; tap again to bring it back. Fatal lines are always shown.

• Refresh — the refresh icon re-reads the latest logs.

Error and warning lines are tinted so problems stand out.

Tap the download icon to save the current logs to a file. The app first shows a warning about what the file contains — confirm it, then choose where the file goes through the system file picker. The file is named with a timestamp (for example T383838meshtastic_logcat_20260701_143312.txt) so repeated exports never overwrite each other. The same warning guards the Packets tab export.

Attach that file to your GitHub issue.

│ 🔒 Privacy: Exports automatically redact private keys, admin keys, session passkeys, and channel

│ PSKs, and suppress raw packet bytes. Everything else stays — the file can contain your message

│ text, precise locations, and node details. Read it before sharing it publicly, and share

│ privately if you have any doubt.

The desktop app has no system logcat, so the App logs tab shows the app's own captured log output instead. Search, filtering, and export work the same way.

• Help & In-App Docs — reading this documentation offline inside the app

• Connections — if the problem is getting connected to your radio in the first place