Php error log not working

Question

It's been working for ages and stopped. I must be missing something obvious so figured stack overflow might be able to help.

/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini relevant settings are:

display_errors = On (not sure if this makes a difference)
log_errors = On
error_log = "/var/www/error_log.log"

In my code I have:

echo 'About to log';
error_log('An error');

I see About to log on the page, but nothing in the error log. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Did you restart the Web server? Until you do php.ini changes are not considered.

Also, if you want to track PHP errors, you need to have track_errors=On and error_reporting=E_ALL, although that is not related with error_log calls. Also make sure that the error log file is writeable by the Web server user.

Answer 2

It ended up being permission issues. The file grew too big to open quickly, so I deleted and recreated it, but with read only permissions.

Totally forgot I deleted it, what a pain.

Answer 3

In my php.ini file (Xampp default), there was a second entry for error_log overriding the one that I had set. So if the other answers do not work for you too, search again for multiple entries of the necessary settings.