Controlling PHP's output stream

Question

I want to keep errors out of my PHP output stream. I only want output of things I explicitly echo.

Looking at my php.ini, is "display_errors" the only configuration I need to change?

Answer 1

Instead of modifying php.ini, you can call this at a very early part of your code:

error_reporting(0);

Note that this means fatal errors will die silently as well, so it makes it a little difficult to debug at first.

Answer 2

You can modify that INI directive and change the flag to 0 (False) or disable error_reporting on a page by page basis

error_reporting(0)

Typically Production environments should be on display_errors = 0 Though not all of us have both Development and Production environments

You can also change the "verbosity" of the error messages by passing different values to error_reporting function (Or by changing the INI value for it in php.ini) More information on that can be found here: PHP: Runetime Configuration - error_reporting

Answer 3

I only recommend that if we're talking about a production machine. display_errors will hide them from the user, but make sure you have log_errors and error_log set in the php.ini so you'll see them on your regular log analysis (you do, right?).

For a development machine, I recommend keeping display_errors on and error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT) so you'll see if anything is fishy.