Question

I have the following code:

<?php 
  if ($foo) {
    echo $foo;
  }
 ?>

However, my page is throwing a 500 internal server error (I know this generally means there’s an error being logged and the page is aborting prematurely) I do not have access to the error log (as the host is logging to syslog).

I can fix it by doing the following:

<?php 
  if (isset($foo) && $foo) {
    echo $foo;
  }
 ?>

but that’s not my question. Is there a server setting that would kill a page attempting to use an unset variable? AFAIK, it only logs a ‘Notice’, which is normally not enough to kill the page.

Here is the first bit of the phpinfo() output (disclaimer: I have no Windows + FastCGI setup experience)

Update
I added a custom error handler and simply output the $errno and $errstr. As expected, it was an E_NOTICE (8) with message ‘Undefined variable’. I’m guessing the 500 internal error has something to do with how it’s logging to the syslog.

Answer 1

Implement a custom error handler and you can do anything you’d like (mostly)!