Can't stop SwiftMailer Exceptions Being Displayed to Browser in Laravel

Question

I am using Laravel for a site. I have a page where users can contact me. This sends me an email using the SwiftMailer bundle. It has just been brought to my attention that the following error is seen when trying to send a message

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Swift_TransportException'

Exception thrown from here /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/yooies_site/bundles/swiftmailer/library/classes/Swift/Transport/Esmtp/AuthHandler.php on line 176

Code at this location is:

  throw new Swift_TransportException(
'Failed to authenticate on SMTP server with username "' .
$this->_username . '" using ' . $count . ' possible authenticators'
);

The cause of the error is not a worry (I found out that I had change my mail password and forgot to change in my sites email config)

The issue I have is that I have Laravel setup to log any exceptions and NOT display them on the main page. I have the following setup in my error.php config file

'detail' => false,
'log' => true,

Why then is my site showing the exception on the page instead of a 500 error?

Full stack trace here (Note I have removed my sites real name and replaced with 'site'

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Swift_TransportException' 
with message 'Failed to authenticate on SMTP server with username "info+site.com" using 2 possible authenticators' 
in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/site/bundles/swiftmailer/library/classes/Swift/Transport/Esmtp/AuthHandler.php:176 

Stack trace: 
#0 /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/site/bundles/swiftmailer/library/classes/Swift/Transport/EsmtpTransport.php(307): Swift_Transport_Esmtp_AuthHandler->afterEhlo(Object(Swift_SmtpTransport)) 
#1 /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/site/bundles/swiftmailer/library/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php(124): Swift_Transport_EsmtpTransport->_doHeloCommand() 
#2 /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/site/bundles/swiftmailer/library/classes/Swift/Mailer.php(79): Swift_Transport_AbstractSmtpTransport->start() 
#3 /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/site/application/libraries/personal/mailer.php(55): Swift_Mailer->send(Object(Swift_Message)) 
#4 /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/site/application/config/error.php(91): Personal\Mai in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/site/bundles/swiftmailer/library/classes/Swift/Transport/Esmtp/AuthHandler.php on line 176

Laravel version is L3.

Bundle URL here http://bundles.laravel.com/bundle/swiftmailer

Answer 1

Swiftmailer doesn't touch any configuration that's responsible for showing errors. Among the recommendations for production servers is to have display_errors = Off and display_startup_errors = Off, which can be set in php.ini, httpd.conf, .htaccess, .user.ini, etc, or even using ini_set(). You should make sure these directives are correctly set.

I'm not familiar with how Laravel handles exceptions and errors, but it looks like the Swift_TransportException is thrown outside of Laravel's error-handling process. Can you point out where in the flow of the application the exception is thrown? Maybe a stack-trace?

PS: Just a tip: Things like sending emails are better not done during a request at all. You could offload it to some sort of queue, and have another process on the server handle it. You could take a look at Gearman for this.

update

Looking at the stack-trace, it seems Laravel does catch the exception because Log::exception(); is invoked (in application/config/error.php line 91). But the trace doesn't reveal how it got there. Maybe you can run it on a development machine where you have Xdebug installed. Xdebug will give you a more precise stack-trace when the exception is throws, ending with public/index.php (where the request started).