Hi all.
I am running Apache 2.2.15 with PHP 5.3.2, 'display_errors' disabled, 'display_startup_errors' disabled, 'log_errors' enabled.
At my setup (so I consider it a norm), PHP aborts on fatal errors, which is good, and sets HTTP status code to 500. Fatal errors include E_ERROR, E_PARSE, E_CORE_ERROR, E_COMPILE_ERROR, E_USER_ERROR and, probably, E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR (cannot trigger it myself, so can't easily check what happens). I think it is a good idea that it does set the code to 500, because I think it is the right thing to do - obviously if your script contains syntax errors and/or fails to do what is supposed to do at runtime, it is a server error, if we consider PHP part of the server.
Now, here is the important part:
Anyway, I have now installed XDebug to track errors better, but I can see that now, no matter the error, even though the script aborts as before on fatal errors, the HTTP status code is always 200. This breaks my client that 'talks' to Apache/PHP via HTTP :|
Also, setting display_errors to On/1, makes PHP no longer set HTTP status code to 500 and exhibits exactly the same behavior as with XDebug above.
I am very much dependent on reliable status code behavior here, and this all leads me to believe it's some kind of fluke or random like weather.. or am I missing something?
UPDATE
There is a blog post which oulines the issue: http://talideon.com/weblog/2008/02/php-errors.cfm
For my part, I have disabled XDebug, seeing as it is what causes the bad behavior in the first place. I only used it for stack tracing anyway, and now use a custom error handler for that instead. Also, the linked article is from 2008, apparently PHP does set HTTP status code to 500 automatically these days. It does so here. Without XDebug, of course.