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Especially on a shared server, you don't always have access to modify the php.ini file. Using a .htaccess file will allow you to set error level at a directory level and also show parse errors, which stop a php script from processing.
WARNING! Be careful that your error handling does not get pushed to production.
.htaccess File Settings
php_flag display_startup_errors on
php_flag display_errors on
php_value error_reporting -1
php_flag html_errors on
How to show hidden files in Mac OS X
The Terminal application is the best way to display hidden files in Mac OS X. The Terminal app enables you to control Mac OS X using the command line to enter Unix commands. We like to think of Terminal as the hood of a car; it allows you to open Mac OS X up and look inside.
Open Terminal (click Go > Utilities and double-click the Terminal app)
Now copy and paste both lines listed below into Terminal one at a time, and press Return after each line:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
killall Finder
How to show hidden files on Windows
- Open Folder Options by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking Appearance and Personalization, and then clicking Folder Options.
- Click the View tab.
- Under Advanced settings, click Show hidden files, folders, and drives, and then click OK.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/show-hidden-files-and-folders-in-windows-vista/
An htaccess file allows you to change
the configuration of your server
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at a directory level.
0:05
This is often the best choice
when on a shared server
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where you don't have access
to the php.ini file.
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This will overwrite what's in your php.ini
file or other configuration files.
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We can use this to turn on, off, or
change the level of errors to display.
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Keep in mind .htaccess
files are hidden files and
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can sometimes be tricky to work with.
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If you're not sure how to work with hidden
files, check the teachers' notes for
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more information.
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If you are using this method,
you should be aware
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that the htaccess file is often used for
other things such as redirection.
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It is also another file used right along
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with the rest of the files
on your application.
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Because of these concerns
you should be careful about
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committing this file to your
version control system.
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Most likely, you do not want the same
settings on dev and production.
0:57
Let's go into work spaces and
see the htaccess file in action.
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One of the things I have included in
this project are a couple error pages.
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To start with, let's preview errors1.php.
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Click the preview icon that looks
like an eye in the top right corner.
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Preview always takes us to
the default page of our project.
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If there is no default page,
it gives us a list of pages.
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We can click on errors1.php.
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We'll see that all we get is a blank
white page, not very helpful.
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And if we go to errors2.php
it gives us a server error.
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Again, no help.
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Let's go into the htaccess file and
turn on errors.
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In workspaces we can't edit
an htaccess file directly,
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because it doesn't understand
the .htaccess as a file extension.
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But if we rename it
briefly to htaccess.txt,
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then we can open the file,
edit it, end then rename it back.
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Because Workspaces is set up
as a development environment,
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it is set to display
all errors by default.
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We're using the htaccess
file to turn off the errors.
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In the htaccess file that's included in
Workspace, you'll see quite a few lines.
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All the lines that start with
a pound sign are just comments
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telling you what's going on.
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So there are really only
four lines of actual code.
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This is not PHP code.
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The htaccess file is a configuration
file for Apache, our web server.
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We'll step through each line.
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The first line tells our server,
Apache, to display startup errors.
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Our second line tells our server
to display all other errors.
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The third line specifies
reporting of all PHP errors.
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And the fourth line turns on HTML markup
of errors making them easier to read.
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If you want to go into this in a little
more depth check out the teacher's notes.
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We'll change all of the off to on.
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We'll also change
error_reporting to minus one.
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That means everything.
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If we save this file
we can then rename it.
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Back to .htaccess.
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Now we can refresh our browser
to see our parse error.
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It tells us that there's an unexpected
closing curly brace at line nine.
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It's expecting a comma or a semicolon.
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Let's go check it out.
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Errors two on line nine.
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Because of the way PHP pretty much ignores
whitespace, it doesn't actually generate
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an error until it encounters
something that is incorrect.
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So we need to look at the line
directly before line nine.
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Since line eight is a blank line,
that means we want line seven.
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We can see that we are indeed
missing a semicolon.
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Let's fix that.
4:24
Now let's refresh our browser.
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Awesome.
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No more errors.
4:33
We'll fix our other
page in the next video.
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If you don't have access to your
server this is often your best option.
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Just be careful that your development
settings do not get pushed to production.
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This brings us to our third option,
your own PHP code.
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