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

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?

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.

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

It's worth noting that if your error is due to .htaccess, for example a missing rewrite_module, you'll still see the 500 internal server error.

Be careful to check if

display_errors

or

error_reporting

is active (not a comment) somewhere else in the ini file.

My development server refused to display errors after upgrade to Kubuntu 16.04 - I had checked php.ini numerous times ... turned out that there was a diplay_errors = off; about 100 lines below my

display_errors = on;

So remember the last one counts!

Try not to go

MAMP > conf > [your PHP version] > php.ini

but

MAMP > bin > php > [your PHP version] > conf > php.ini

and change it there, it worked for me...

Enabling error displaying from PHP code doesn't work out for me. In my case, using NGINX and PHP-FMP, I track the log file using grep. For instance, I know the file name mycode.php causes the error 500, but don't know which line. From the console, I use this:

/var/log/php-fpm# cat www-error.log | grep mycode.php

And I have the output:

[04-Apr-2016 06:58:27] PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected ';' in /var/www/html/system/mycode.php on line 1458

This helps me find the line where I have the typo.

If all else fails try moving (i.e. in bash) all files and directories "away" and adding them back one by one.

I just found out that way that my .htaccess file was referencing a non-existant .htpasswd file. (#silly)