Feature Request: add verbose mode to "studio site start" to better report start up errors

[jonathanwhitelandnet]

What

studio site start – or "Start" in the app's UI – will fail to start with the error:

'startServer': CliCommandError: [Last error message] Failed to start WordPress server: WordPress server process exited unexpectedly

when a particular custom plugin is active. That same plugin can be activated (and is fully functional) if activated after the server is started.

There doesn't seem to any way to debug what the issue is, that is: studio site start doesn't have a --verbose option, for example, that might otherwise give some hints.

The debug options within Settings only work once WordPress is up and running, and it never gets that far.

Why

The studio-<date>.log file doesn't any information what might help determine what it is about a particular custom plugin that's unhappy at site start up (but otherwise activates and runs fine), for example:

[2026-05-26T14:01:56.812Z][erro][main] Error occurred in handler for 'startServer': CliCommandError: [Last error message] Failed to start WordPress server: WordPress server process exited unexpectedly
  [Base message] Failed to start site
  [Exit code] 1

Any more details here might well give some useful clues.

How

No response

[jonathanwhitelandnet]

Ah, I found what was causing the startup failure: a URL-redirecting plugin was insufficiently validating that $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] contained a valid, non-empty path. Something during WordPress Studio's startup accesses a URL that gives rise to a blank path. This gist:

Example of a WordPress plugin which silently interrupts "WordPress Studio" start up

contains a distilled version of the plugin illustrating the check needed (this version works). Removing the explicit check for a blank path in that gist causes WordPress Studio to fail to start.

Hopefully, the proposed pull request would now log something useful when a plugin issue like this is the cause of a start up failure.