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How to Quickly Find the PHP Errors that Are Preventing Your Application from Working Correctly

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One of the aspects of the developer work that takes us more time is finding and fixing bugs. Sometimes a subtle bug may take us hours to discover the code that is causing the bug and correct the code.

This fact is particularly true when you develop in PHP because the PHP language is very tolerant of programmer mistakes, and subtle bugs do not make the PHP scripts stop working.

Fortunately, there are methods and tools that you use to detect those bugs faster when you can capture the PHP error messages the mistakes may cause.

Please read this short article to learn how to use the Scout Application Performance Monitoring tool to quickly determine the lines of code of a Laravel or Symfony application causing the application to trigger PHP errors that can help you locate the code that you need to fix.




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In this article you will learn about:

1. Why You Need to Quickly Find the Errors in Your Application

2. What You Can Do to Find Your Application Errors

3. How to Find Your PHP Application Errors

4. How to Find Your PHP Application Errors Faster


1. Why You Need to Quickly Find the Errors in Your Application

Nobody is perfect. As humans, we commit mistakes. Sometimes we make mistakes that we take a lot of time to discover.

For developers like us that create applications that have public exposure, it may look bad if our mistakes affect the way our applications should work. This circumstance affects our reputation and our customer's perception of the quality of our work.

Sometimes, our mistakes may make our customers not want to hire us anymore. So you may lose business.

So the sooner you find the mistakes we made, the better. Then we can fix the errors. So finding our mistakes as quickly as possible, the better. This attitude of finding and fixing our mistakes as fast as possible will always contribute to the perceived quality of our work.

2. What You Can Do to Find Your PHP Application Errors

Ideally, it would help if you had tests for features you implement in your PHP applications. Then you would only consider your application features done when the application passes all tests.

In theory, tests should be all that we need. In practice, when we create tests for our applications, we do that only for aspects and use cases of the features we know.

This fact means that we may ignore certain aspects, and use cases we did not remember may also happen.

In practice, we may end up shipping the application with errors we are unaware of, but our application users will notice them sooner or later. Even worse is when our application users do not report the errors.

Fortunately, in PHP, there is a way to reduce the number of errors our applications have.

Often our mistakes cause PHP code not to work well and trigger run-time errors. So, if you capture the PHP run time errors, you may discover the mistakes that our application may still have.

3. How to Find Your Application Errors

If you use this method of capturing the PHP errors, you can enable the PHP error log by either changing the main PHP configuration file php.ini to set the error_log option to the path of a file on which the runtime PHP errors will appear.

Alternatively, you can also have PHP code to change that option at run time like as follows:

<?php

// Enable the error logging to a file
ini_set("log_errors", 1);

// Set the path of the error log file
ini_set("error_log", "/path/of/the/php-error-log-file/directory/php-error.log");

// Avoid displaying errors on the current page
ini_set("display_errors", 0);

You may want to check the PHP manual to learn more about other options that you can use to configure further details of the PHP error logging.

Once you set the PHP error logging to save error messages, you need to monitor the PHP errors. If you use, for instance a Linux-based server, you can access the Linux shell and use the tail command to watch the last lines that appear in the error log file, like this:

$ tail -f /path/of/the/php-error-log-file/directory/php-error.log

4. How to Find Your Application Errors Faster

Watching a PHP error log can be an excellent solution to get you started in finding your PHP application error logs.

However, you may not want to wait for the PHP errors to appear in the PHP error log file because they may only appear sporadically.

What you can do is use a PHP error monitoring solution that you can use when you have time to process any errors that appear and fix the causes of those errors.

There are several PHP error monitoring solutions available. If you use either Laravel or Symfony frameworks to develop your applications, you can use a tool like Scout Application Monitoring to monitor the errors of PHP applications based on these frameworks.

Below is an example screenshot of the Scout APM tool showing a report of the recent errors in an application.

Soon there will be more about Demo of Scout in PHP. For now, I invite you to watch this video of a Demo of Scout in PHP. By watching this video, you can learn to monitor errors of PHP Laravel or Symfony applications.

Then you can also try this tool for free during a trial period so you can use it in simple Laravel or Symfony applications you developed.

How to Find the Errors that Are Preventing Your Application from Working Correctly




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