How to set up error logging with PHP

So you got finished with your brand new website. It is completely PHP driven and looks very nice. But are you sure that everything works perfectly? Under every circumstances?

No. You can never be absolutely sure. That is why you need a log file to see if there where some errors. Well, if you are the kind of person that doesn’t care if some jerks who behaved wrong on you website get error messages, then you probably don’t need an error log file.

In case you aren’t using your own server, you normally won’t have access to automatically generated log files. That’s why we need to generate them especially for us.

And that’s how it’s done:

ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('log_errors',TRUE);
ini_set('html_errors',FALSE);
ini_set('error_log','/home/htdocs/webXX/html/error_log.txt');
ini_set('display_errors',FALSE);

The first two lines tell PHP to report every error. Even the tiny ones. Line three says that those errors should be logged. The next line makes sure that these errors won’t include HTML and line five sets the path to the log file. The last line is to prevent the errors from being displayed to the user. Most users normally have no idea what’s going on when they get an error message presented. So that’s why.

Just include the code in scripts where you want to keep track of errors. Now you can see if anyone got any errors by checking the error_log.txt file.