How can I get php to return 500 upon encountering a fatal exception?

PHP fatal errors come back as status code 200 to the HTTP client. How can I make it return a status code 500 (Internal server error)?

header("HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error");

This is exactly the problem I had yesterday and I found solution as follows:

1) first of all, you need to catch PHP fatal errors, which is error type E_ERROR. when this error occurs, script will be stored the error and terminate execution. you can get the stored error by calling function error_get_last().

2) before script terminated, a callback function register_shutdown_function() will always be called. so you need to register a error handler by this function to do what you want, in this case, return header 500 and a customized internal error page (optional).

function my_error_handler()
{
  $last_error = error_get_last();
  if ($last_error && $last_error['type']==E_ERROR)
      {
        header("HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error");
        echo '...';//html for 500 page
      }
}
register_shutdown_function('my_error_handler');

Note: if you want to catch custom error type, which start with E_USER*, you can use function set_error_handler() to register error handler and trigger error by function trigger_error, however, this error handler can not handle E_ERROR error type. see explanation on php.net about error handler

Standard PHP configuration does return 500 when error occurs! Just make sure that your display_errors = off. You can simulate it with:

ini_set('display_errors', 0); 
noFunction();

On production display_errors directive is off by default.

I have used "set_exception_handler" to handle uncaught exceptions.

function handleException($ex) {
      error_log("Uncaught exception class=" . get_class($ex) . " message=" . $ex->getMessage() . " line=" . $ex->getLine());
      ob_end_clean(); # try to purge content sent so far
      header('HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error');
      echo 'Internal error';
    }

set_exception_handler('handleException');