How can I make PHP display the error instead of giving me 500 Internal Server Error [duplicate]

This has never happened before. Usually it displays the error, but now it just gives me a 500 internal server error. Of course before, when it displayed the error, it was different servers. Now I'm on a new server (I have full root, so if I need to configure it somewhere in the php.ini, I can.) Or perhaps its something with Apache?

I've been putting up with it by just transferring the file to my other server and running it there to find the error, but that's become too tedious. Is there a way to fix this?

Solution 1:

Check the error_reporting, display_errors and display_startup_errors settings in your php.ini file. They should be set to E_ALL and "On" respectively (though you should not use display_errors on a production server, so disable this and use log_errors instead if/when you deploy it). You can also change these settings (except display_startup_errors) at the very beginning of your script to set them at runtime (though you may not catch all errors this way):

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 'On');

After that, restart server.

Solution 2:

Use php -l <filename> (that's an 'L') from the command line to output the syntax error that could be causing PHP to throw the status 500 error. It'll output something like:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '}' in <filename> on line 18