Php display all errors and notices
- Different ways to write a PHP code
- How to write comments in PHP ?
- Introduction to Codeignitor (PHP)
- How to echo HTML in PHP ?
- Error handling in PHP
- How to show All Errors in PHP ?
- How to Start and Stop a Timer in PHP ?
- How to create default function parameter in PHP?
- How to check if mod_rewrite is enabled in PHP ?
- Web Scraping in PHP Using Simple HTML DOM Parser
- How to pass form variables from one page to other page in PHP ?
- How to display logged in user information in PHP ?
- How to find out where a function is defined using PHP ?
- How to Get $_POST from multiple check-boxes ?
- How to Secure hash and salt for PHP passwords ?
- Program to Insert new item in array on any position in PHP
- PHP append one array to another
- How to delete an Element From an Array in PHP ?
- How to print all the values of an array in PHP ?
- How to perform Array Delete by Value Not Key in PHP ?
- Removing Array Element and Re-Indexing in PHP
- How to count all array elements in PHP ?
- How to insert an item at the beginning of an array in PHP ?
- PHP Check if two arrays contain same elements
- Merge two arrays keeping original keys in PHP
- PHP program to find the maximum and the minimum in array
- How to check a key exists in an array in PHP ?
- PHP | Second most frequent element in an array
- Sort array of objects by object fields in PHP
- PHP | Sort array of strings in natural and standard orders
- How to pass PHP Variables by reference ?
- How to format Phone Numbers in PHP ?
- How to use php serialize() and unserialize() Function
- Implementing callback in PHP
- PHP | Merging two or more arrays using array_merge()
- PHP program to print an arithmetic progression series using inbuilt functions
- How to prevent SQL Injection in PHP ?
- How to extract the user name from the email ID using PHP ?
- How to count rows in MySQL table in PHP ?
- How to parse a CSV File in PHP ?
- How to generate simple random password from a given string using PHP ?
- How to upload images in MySQL using PHP PDO ?
- How to check foreach Loop Key Value in PHP ?
- How to properly Format a Number With Leading Zeros in PHP ?
- How to get a File Extension in PHP ?
- How to get the current Date and Time in PHP ?
- PHP program to change date format
- How to convert DateTime to String using PHP ?
- How to get Time Difference in Minutes in PHP ?
- Return all dates between two dates in an array in PHP
- Sort an array of dates in PHP
- How to get the time of the last modification of the current page in PHP?
- How to convert a Date into Timestamp using PHP ?
- How to add 24 hours to a unix timestamp in php?
- Sort a multidimensional array by date element in PHP
- Convert timestamp to readable date/time in PHP
- PHP | Number of week days between two dates
- PHP | Converting string to Date and DateTime
- How to get last day of a month from date in PHP ?
- PHP | Change strings in an array to uppercase
- How to convert first character of all the words uppercase using PHP ?
- How to get the last character of a string in PHP ?
- How to convert uppercase string to lowercase using PHP ?
- How to extract Numbers From a String in PHP ?
- How to replace String in PHP ?
- How to Encrypt and Decrypt a PHP String ?
- How to display string values within a table using PHP ?
- How to write Multi-Line Strings in PHP ?
- How to check if a String Contains a Substring in PHP ?
- How to append a string in PHP ?
- How to remove white spaces only beginning/end of a string using PHP ?
- How to Remove Special Character from String in PHP ?
- How to create a string by joining the array elements using PHP ?
- How to prepend a string in PHP ?
How to Display PHP Errors and Enable Error Reporting
I still vividly remember the first time I learned about PHP error handling.
It was in my fourth year of programming, my second with PHP, and I’d applied for a developer position at a local agency. The application required me to send in a code sample (GitHub as we know it didn’t exist back then) so I zipped and sent a simple custom CMS I’d created the previous year.
The email I got back from the person reviewing the code still chills my bones to this day.
«I was a bit worried about your project, but once I turned error reporting off, I see it actually works pretty well».
That was the first time I searched «PHP error reporting», discovered how to enable it, and died inside when I saw the stream of errors that were hidden from me before.
PHP errors and error reporting are something that many developers new to the language might miss initially. This is because, on many PHP based web server installations, PHP errors may be suppressed by default. This means that no one sees or is even aware of these errors.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to know where and how to enable them, especially for your local development environment. This helps you pick up errors in your code early on.
How to show PHP errors
If you Google «PHP errors» one of the first results you will see is a link to the error_reporting function documentation.
This function allows you to both set the level of PHP error reporting, when your PHP script (or collection of scripts) runs, or retrieve the current level of PHP error reporting, as defined by your PHP configuration.
The error_reporting function accepts a single parameter, an integer, which indicates which level of reporting to allow. Passing nothing as a parameter simply returns the current level set.
There is a long list of possible values you can pass as a parameter, but we’ll dive into those later.
For now it’s important to know that each possible value also exists as a PHP predefined constant. So for example, the constant E_ERROR has the value of 1. This means you could either pass 1 , or E_ERROR to the error_reporting function, and get the same result.
As a quick example, if we create a php_error_test.php PHP script file, we can see the current error reporting level set, as well as set it to a new level.
Error reporting configuration
Using the error_reporting function in this way is great when you just want to see any errors related to the piece of code you’re currently working on.
But it would be better to control which errors are being reported on in your local development environment, and log them somewhere logical, to be able to review as you code. This can be done inside the PHP initialization (or php.ini ) file.
The php.ini file is responsible for configuring all the aspects of PHP’s behavior. In it you can set things like how much memory to allocate to PHP scripts, what size file uploads to allow, and what error_reporting level(s) you want for your environment.
If you’re not sure where your php.ini file is located, one way to find out is to create a PHP script which uses the phpinfo function. This function will output all the information relative to your PHP install.
As you can see from my phpinfo, my current php.ini file is located at /etc/php/7.3/apache2/php.ini .
Once you’ve found your php.ini file, open it in your editor of choice, and search for the section called ‘Error handling and logging’. Here’s where the fun begins!
Error reporting directives
The first thing you’ll see in that section is a section of comments which include a detailed description of all the Error Level Constants. This is great, because you’ll be using them later on to set your error reporting levels.
Fortunately these constants are also documented in the online PHP Manual, for ease of reference.
Below this list is a second list of Common Values. This shows you how to set some commonly used sets of error reporting value combinations, including the default values, the suggested value for a development environment, and the suggested values for a production environment.
; Common Values: ; E_ALL (Show all errors, warnings and notices including coding standards.) ; E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE (Show all errors, except for notices) ; E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_STRICT (Show all errors, except for notices and coding standards warnings.) ; E_COMPILE_ERROR|E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR|E_ERROR|E_CORE_ERROR (Show only errors) ; Default Value: E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_STRICT & ~E_DEPRECATED ; Development Value: E_ALL ; Production Value: E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICTFinally, at the bottom of all the comments is the current value of your error_reporting level. For local development, I’d suggest setting it to E_ALL , so as to see all errors.
This is usually one of the first things I set when I set up a new development environment. That way I’ll see any and all errors that are reported.
After the error_reporting directive, there are some additional directives you can set. As before, the php.ini file includes descriptions of each directive, but I’ll give a brief description of the important ones below.
The display_errors directive allows you to toggle whether PHP outputs the errors or not. I usually have this set to On, so I can see errors as they happen.
The display_startup_errors allows for the same On/Off toggling of errors that may occur during PHP’s startup sequence. These are typically errors in your PHP or web server configuration, not specifically your code. It’s recommended to leave this Off, unless you’re debugging a problem and you aren’t sure what’s causing it.
The log_errors directive tells PHP whether or not to log errors to an error log file. This is always On by default, and is recommended.
The rest of the directives can be left as the default, except for maybe the error_log directive, which allows you to specify where to log the errors, if log_errors is on. By default it will log the errors wherever your web server has defined them to be logged.
Custom error logging
I use the Apache web server on Ubuntu, and my project-specific virtual host configurations use the following to determine the location for the error log.
This means it will log to the default Apache log directory, which is /var/log/apache2 , under a file called project-error.log . Usually I replace project with the name of the web project it relates to.
So, depending on your local development environment you may need to tweak this to suit your needs. Alternatively, if you can’t change this at the web server level, you can set it at the php.ini level to a specific location.
It is worth noting that this will log all PHP errors to this file, and if you’re working on multiple projects that might not be ideal. However, always knowing to check that one file for errors might work better for you, so your mileage may vary.
Find and fix those errors
If you’ve recently started coding in PHP, and you decide to turn error reporting on, be prepared to deal with the fallout from your existing code. You may see some things you didn’t expect, and need to fix.
The advantage though, is now that you know how to turn it all on at the server level, you can make sure you see these errors when they happen, and deal with them before someone else sees them!
Oh, and if you were wondering, the errors I was referring to at the start of this post were related to the fact that I was defining constants incorrectly, by not adding quotes around the constant name.
define(CONSTANT, 'Hello world.');PHP allowed (and might still allow) this, but it would trigger a notice.
Notice: Use of undefined constant CONSTANT - assumed 'CONSTANT' This notice was triggered every time I defined a constant, which for that project was about 8 or 9 times. Not great for someone to see 8 or 9 notices at the top of each page.