How to receive email every time PHP error is thrown on our website

Question

I realize this may be a ridiculous question, but does anyone know how I can setup our website to send an email to our admin every time a PHP error is thrown on our website?

Answer 1

Use an error handler. For example, from: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/quick-tip-email-error-logs-to-yourself-with-php/

// Our custom error handler  
function nettuts_error_handler($number, $message, $file, $line, $vars)  

{  
    $email = " 
        <p>An error ($number) occurred on line  
        <strong>$line</strong> and in the <strong>file: $file.</strong>  
        <p> $message </p>";  

    $email .= "<pre>" . print_r($vars, 1) . "</pre>";  

    $headers = 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";  

    // Email the error to someone...  
    error_log($email, 1, 'you@youremail.com', $headers);  

    // Make sure that you decide how to respond to errors (on the user's side)  
    // Either echo an error message, or kill the entire project. Up to you...  
    // The code below ensures that we only "die" if the error was more than  
    // just a NOTICE.   
    if ( ($number !== E_NOTICE) && ($number < 2048) ) {  
        die("There was an error. Please try again later.");  
    }  
}  

// We should use our custom function to handle errors.  
set_error_handler('nettuts_error_handler'); 

Answer 2

In theory, when you know that something could break, you should go with the try/catch construct, like this and add a simple mail() command [but setting up mail() is another big topic, but let's skip this in detail].

try { 
  // your actions that may fail
} catch (Exception $e) { 
  // the catch block happens only when your above stuff fails
  // when exactly things fail can be read here
  // http://php.net/manual/en/language.exceptions.php
  // getMessage() really get the human-readable error content  
  $message = $e->getMessage();       
  mail('caffeinated@example.com', 'My Subject', $message);
} 

Answer 3

I guess it depends a lot on how complex you want it to be but https://github.com/Seldaek/monolog should be able to do what you want.

It might be too much though.