I want codeigniter to echo php errors instead of 500 internal error

Question

I have currently set my Codeigniter root index.php's environment variable to development.

And I haven't also enabled tiny URL mode.

I don't like to check /var/log/apache2/error.log every night and day!

Want my PHP errors back to the page. 500 Internal error is really the *HARD*est method that can be used to show the error.

Note that we are working on an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server with default config.

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comment I'm doubtful that this is CodeIgniter's issue. It's more likely that you simply have display_errors set to off in your php.ini.

If I remember correctly, CI's index.php contains a call to ini_set('error_reporting', ..); to change the default behaviour anyway, so you could always look in there first and see what's going on.

Just had a look, here's the default:

/*
|---------------------------------------------------------------
| PHP ERROR REPORTING LEVEL
|---------------------------------------------------------------
|
| By default CI runs with error reporting set to ALL.  For security
| reasons you are encouraged to change this when your site goes live.
| For more info visit:  http://www.php.net/error_reporting
|
*/
    error_reporting(E_ALL);

If you simply add under there ini_set('display_errors', 1);, it should start working just fine. Obviously the best bet would be to add a switch for your environment to set these variables, I'm not sure why it's not like that already, but here's an example:

if (defined('ENVIRONMENT'))
{
    switch (ENVIRONMENT)
    {
        case 'development':
            error_reporting(E_ALL);
            ini_set('display_errors', 1);
            break;
        case 'production':
            error_reporting(0);
            ini_set('display_errors', 0);
            break;
    }
}