How to: turn off SharePoint Custom Errors

When you deploy to SharePoint, you are likely to hit a page that informs you or an error pertaining to your code but which provides very little information about it. If you’d like to get more information about the actual error, you will have to disable the Custom Errors in order to get the full error message. To do that, follow the simple steps below (works in both SP2007 / SP2010).

1. Browse to the folder where your web application resides (something like c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\specificWebAppFolder)
2. (it might be a good idea to back up the file before messing with it) Edit the file web.config, search for “CustomErrors” and change the value to “off” in this line: <customErrors mode=”Off” /> (if this is a production environment, you might want to change the value to “RemoteOnly”)
3. Search for “CallStack” and change the value to “true” in this line <SafeMode MaxControls=”200″ CallStack=”true” DirectFileDependencies=”10″ TotalFileDependencies=”50″ AllowPageLevelTrace=”false”>
4. Another thing you might want to do is to enable the PageLevelTrace. In the same line as above, change the AllowPageLevelTrace to “true”.
5. Save the file and maybe to an iisreset for the changes to take effect.