How can I make PHP display the error instead of giving me 500 Internal Server Error [duplicate]

Answer 1

Enabling error displaying from PHP code doesn't work out for me. In my case, using NGINX and PHP-FMP, I track the log file using grep. For instance, I know the file name mycode.php causes the error 500, but don't know which line. From the console, I use this:

/var/log/php-fpm# cat www-error.log | grep mycode.php

And I have the output:

[04-Apr-2016 06:58:27] PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected ';' in /var/www/html/system/mycode.php on line 1458

This helps me find the line where I have the typo.

Answer 2

Check the error_reporting, display_errors and display_startup_errors settings in your php.ini file. They should be set to E_ALL and "On" respectively (though you should not use display_errors on a production server, so disable this and use log_errors instead if/when you deploy it). You can also change these settings (except display_startup_errors) at the very beginning of your script to set them at runtime (though you may not catch all errors this way):

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 'On');

After that, restart server.

Answer 3

It's worth noting that if your error is due to .htaccess, for example a missing rewrite_module, you'll still see the 500 internal server error.

Answer 4

Use "php -l <filename>" (that's an 'L') from the command line to output the syntax error that could be causing PHP to throw the status 500 error. It'll output something like:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '}' in <filename> on line 18

Answer 5

If all else fails try moving (i.e. in bash) all files and directories "away" and adding them back one by one.

I just found out that way that my .htaccess file was referencing a non-existant .htpasswd file. (#silly)

Answer 6

Be careful to check if

display_errors

or

error_reporting

is active (not a comment) somewhere else in the ini file.

My development server refused to display errors after upgrade to Kubuntu 16.04 - I had checked php.ini numerous times ... turned out that there was a diplay_errors = off; about 100 lines below my

display_errors = on;

So remember the last one counts!