Reporting a bug

First, be aware that in Drupal all fixed-point releases (like 8.x-4.0-alpha5, or 7.x-3.10) are immutable - they will always be the same, and always contain the same bugs they were born with, forever and ever. If you find a bug, it may have already been fixed in a newer version. And when we develop fixes for bugs, you will need to upgrade to the next release (or apply a patch) to get the bug fix. Or get the -dev release, which is an ever-changing release that is updated with each change/bug fix and is always the most current code.

When you think you've found a bug, the first thing to do is search the Ubercart issue queue to see if it has already been found and fixed. To do that you will have to select the "Any" issue status for your search, don't just search the "Open issues" - you want to search the "Closed" issues as well to find bugs that have been fixed. Be sure to search the correct version of Ubercart - "8.x issues" if you're using Drupal 8. This will eliminate a lot of search results that don't apply to the version you're using.

Search several times, using many different keywords. Some exact text from the error message is a good start. Don't include any directory paths that are specific to your machine, you'll never get a match with those in there! For example, one minor error that was reported recently was a PHP Notice that said "Notice: Undefined variable: changes". See if you can find that - it will always be there in the closed issues.

If you DO find your error in an existing issue, read through the issue and see if there's a solution or a proposed solution. If the issue is still open, then we haven't made a fix yet. Testing out the proposed solution and posting your experience with the proposed solution is EXTREMELY valuable to us - please help! Or if you have suggestions or have found a fix or workaround on your own, please share! If there is a fix, you can apply the patch and test it out (open issues) or apply the patch and have your problem solved (closed issues). Applying a patch is discussed in Applying patches.

If you can't find your problem in the issue queue after doing everything above, the next step is to update to the latest version of Ubercart and see if that fixes your problem. Or try to reproduce your problem on another machine that has the latest code. (We have fixed hundreds of things since -alpha5 that don't show up in the issue queue because we're still in the alpha phase of code development. When that settles down and we get to a beta release we will start opening up an issue for every fix.)

A convenient way to test with the latest development release without having to mess with your own web site is to go to https://simplytest.me/project/ubercart/8.x-4.x and use that to set up a clean Ubercart site, which will be live for 24 hours. This is surprisingly fast - you can have a site set up and configured in about 5 minutes! Configure that site to reproduce your problem, then report what you had to do to reproduce the problem. This is the first thing the Ubercart maintainers do when they try to confirm any bug reported here, so doing this first is a great way to narrow down what exactly is causing the problem by providing a way for people to confirm what you're seeing. If you can do this, open up a new bug report in the Ubercart issue queue and be sure to write down all the steps needed to reproduce your problem. Make sure you include information like what page the problem happened on, and what action(s) you took to cause the problem to appear.

If you can't reproduce the problem on simplytest.me, that could mean its related to your specific site setup or to some contributed module that you have installed on your site but not on simplytest.me. (Note that if you go to that simplytest.me link above there are "Advanced options" where you can add additional modules at site setup time, if you suspect one of them is a problem. But it's easier to try disabling those other contributed modules one by one on your site to see if the problem goes away, before you go back to simplytest.me and start adding more modules.)

Regardless, if we can't reproduce the problem, we can't fix it, so providing a complete list of steps for recreating the problem, and doing it on a clean site that others can replicate is essential.