MacSymbolicator: Tool to Symbolicate Your Crash Reports

I am not good at reading crash logs of my apps. Some errors are obvious, like index out of bounds exceptions. Others require actual symbolication of the crash log to reveal the symbol aka function name in the stack trace. You can do this in the command line and interactively explore the crash reasons like a caveperson.

Or you use a converter app.

I didn’t have any for quite a while, but was frustrated enough again today to search for an app.

MacSymbolicator 2.0 makes symbolication of crash reports super easy.

Enter MacSymbolicator 2.0!

It’s a window with two drag targets: one for the crash, and the other for the dSYM to resolve symbols from memory addresses.

The app even tries to find the dSYM for you. In my case, the crash log was for a previous app version but MacSymbolicator pulled up the dSYM for a newer version. Easy to fix, though:

  • head to your .xcarchive by revealing it in Finder from Xcode’s “Organizer” window,
  • show its package contents,
  • go to the dSYMs/ subdirectory,
  • drag the app’s .dsym file into the right-hand pane.

It’s open source and just works. Lovely. Big shoutout to Mahdi Bchatnia, creator of this tool!

Visit his website for a binary download of the app, or GitHub for the source.