Question

Is there a PHP function or some other way of obtaining the PHP error log as a string?

I need this because I cannot access the error log of a site I am running on someone else’s server. – He offered to email me the error log, but that isn’t exactly convenient.

Is there some way I could output the error log to a PHP page?

---

I realize that viewing the entire server’s error log is not really going to happen for me. However, I know you can do something like this to email a manual error_log call to yourself:

error_log('A really bad error', 3, '[e-mail]');

Is it possible to configure a page to email errors to you instead of displaying them?

Answer 1

On a badly secured server, yes. But on most servers there are two users: apache and [ you ]. You don’t have access to the server logs, since they are owned by the apache user (or whichever server you’re using).

However, you could probably try it:

echo file_get_contents('/var/log/httpd/error_log');

Note: that’s the default location on a RedHat-based apache server. It may be different

Update To reflect the updated question
No, you cannot view the error log with error_log – it is a one-way process that gets handled by the webserver. It only writes the log, but you cannot read it.

You can probably display the errors with this:

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

You could even use set_error_handler to handle all warnings and notices (for example, to mail them). But that’s pretty much all you can do.