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Collect dumps on crash

Configuring your application to collect a dump on crash is done by setting specific environment variables. This is helpful when you want to get an understanding of why a crash happened. For example, capturing a dump when an exception is thrown helps you identify an issue by examining the state of the app when it crashed.

The following table shows the environment variables you can configure for collecting dumps on a crash.

Environment variable Description Default value
DOTNET_DbgEnableMiniDump If set to 1, enable core dump generation. 0
DOTNET_DbgMiniDumpType Type of dump to be collected. For more information, see Types of mini dumps. 2 (Heap)
DOTNET_DbgMiniDumpName Path to a file to write the dump to. Ensure that the user under which the dotnet process is running has write permissions to the specified directory. /tmp/coredump.<pid>
DOTNET_CreateDumpDiagnostics If set to 1, enables diagnostic logging of dump process. 0
DOTNET_EnableCrashReport (not supported on Windows.)
If set to 1, the runtime generates a JSON-formatted crash report that includes information about the threads and stack frames of the crashing application. The crash report name is the dump path or name with .crashreport.json appended.
DOTNET_CreateDumpVerboseDiagnostics If set to 1, enables verbose diagnostic logging of the dump process. 0
DOTNET_CreateDumpLogToFile The path of the file to which the diagnostic messages should be written. If unset, the diagnostic messages are written to the console of the crashing application.

File path templates

Starting in .NET 5, DOTNET_DbgMiniDumpName can also include formatting template specifiers that will be filled in dynamically:

Specifier Value
%% A single % character
%p PID of dumped process
%e The process executable filename
%h Host name return by gethostname()
%t Time of dump, expressed as seconds since the Epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 (UTC)

Types of mini dumps

The following table shows all the values you can use for DOTNET_DbgMiniDumpType. For example, setting DOTNET_DbgMiniDumpType to 1 means Mini type dump will be collected on a crash.

Value Name Description
1 Mini A small dump containing module lists, thread lists, exception information, and all stacks.
2 Heap A large and relatively comprehensive dump containing module lists, thread lists, all stacks, exception information, handle information, and all memory except for mapped images.
3 Triage Same as Mini, but removes personal user information, such as paths and passwords.
4 Full The largest dump containing all memory including the module images.

Only full dumps are supported by the single-file and Native AOT app models.