ColdFusion Production Debugging Without Exposing Sensitive Error Data to Users

The goal is to see everything you need to diagnose a production problem while users see nothing but a friendly error page. You achieve this with a layered approach: (1) in the ColdFusion Administrator, disable debugging output and never enable “Robust Exception Information” on a production server — a failed error handler with robust exceptions on will dump stack traces, queries, and file paths straight to users; (2) implement a global error handler (onError in Application.cfc, plus onMissingTemplate and a site-wide error handler as a backstop) that catches exceptions, shows a generic friendly page, and sets the right HTTP status; (3) log the full diagnostic detail to secure, admin-only log files with cflog/writeLog, redacting secrets before they're written; and (4) for deep production diagnosis, use IP-restricted debugging or a proper APM (FusionReactor, SeeFusion, New Relic) rather than on-page debug output. Done right, you get full visibility into what broke without ever handing an attacker a roadmap of your server internals. This guide walks through each layer with verified CFML.
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