Managing PHP Errors

Question

I have been searching all over the net to try and find a way to catch all errors thrown by PHP (5.3)

I have been reading through the documentation and it looks like set_error_handler is what I need but it doesn't get fatal/parse errors. I'm not sure if this is possible...

Here is my source: https://github.com/tarnfeld/PHP-Error-Handler Feel free to fork/commit if you know better solutions to all of this.

Thanks in advanced!

Updated!

Using the answers below I finished writing an error handler, it takes care of E_ERROR|E_PARSE|E_WARNING|E_NOTICE and will kill the script when it is fatal! :-)

Answer 1

Quoting the manual:

The following error types cannot be handled with a user defined function: E_ERROR, E_PARSE, E_CORE_ERROR, E_CORE_WARNING, E_COMPILE_ERROR, E_COMPILE_WARNING, and most of E_STRICT raised in the file where set_error_handler() is called.

This means Fatals cannot be caught and handled. What you can do is setup an additional handler to be run when the script exits, e.g. register_shutdown_function.

In that handler, use error_get_last and check if it was a Fatal Error. This will not allow you to continue script execution though. The script will end, but you can do any cleanup or logging (usually fatals will be logged anyway to the error.log) or whatever.

There is a user-supplied example in the comments below set_error_handler

register_shutdown_function('shutdownFunction');
function shutDownFunction() {
    $error = error_get_last();
    if ($error['type'] == 1) {
        //do your stuff    
    }
}

But note that this still will only catch certain additional runtime errors.

Answer 2

You may keep an eye on error_log. In Ubuntu this is located in /var/log/apache2/error_log

Answer 3

So called "fatal errors" is perhaps the most annoying bug in php. The best we can do about it is to convince "php group" to recognize this bug as such, by voting for this request http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=28331.

As long as this is not fixed, we're doomed to use dirty hacks like shutdown error handlers or autoloads.

Answer 4

No, catching fatal and parse errors is not possible. Parse errors because they're raised before script is even compiled. Fatal errors because they're ... fatal (i.e. script cannot continue running after encountering them)

Answer 5

If you want to catch fatal errors (including parse errors) the the best solution is to set up error_logging in the php.ini file, e.g.

display_errors = Off
log_errors = On
ignore_repeated_errors = Off
ignore_repeated_source = Off