Turning customerrors “off” in _layouts web.config for Debug Mode in SharePoint 2013

To set a web application to debug mode…

Open the

web.config

(C:inetpubwwwrootwssVirtualDirectories) and set:

• Debug=”true” instead of the default of Debug=”false”
• CallStack=”true” instead of the default of CallStack=”false”
• CustomErrors=”Off” instead of the default of CustomErrors=”On”

I would have expected this to be enough to catch all errors but when I tried to delete a content type that was probably in use, instead of getting the detailed message I was expecting, I ended up getting the infamous message telling me to change the customerrors setting in the web.config so that I can see the details:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.
Runtime Error

Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed.
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on the local server machine, please create a tag within a “web.config” configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its “mode” attribute set to “RemoteOnly”. To enable the details to be viewable on remote machines, please set “mode” to “Off”.

As a refresher to anyone else that is running into this problem, there is another

web.config

in the

_layouts

directory (“C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions15”) where you need to turn the

customErrors

to be “Off”: