Question

I created a PHP script to read the error log file in a customized visual format, but right now, I have the path to the error log file hard-coded in, which works fine for me, but I would like to find out if there’s a way to pull the path to the error_log automatically so it can work on any server without further configuration.

Answer 1

You can use ini_get to obtain the error_log path in PHP.

$error_log = ini_get('error_log');

Otherwise, you’d be relegated to using something like:

<?php
ob_start();
phpinfo(INFO_CONFIGURATION);

$phpinfo = ob_get_contents();

ob_end_clean();

preg_match('#error_log</td><td\b[^>]*>(.*?)</td>#', $phpinfo, $matches);
$error_log = $matches[1];

Note that if there is no error_log set, $error_log will return:

<i>no value</i>