Logging Errors and Best Practices
Log errors to files and follow production error-handling patterns.
Why Logging Matters
In production, you can't show errors to users but you still need to know when things go wrong. Logging captures error details to files or services so you can investigate later.
error_log()
The simplest logging function — writes a message to PHP's error log:
<?php
error_log('User login failed for: ' . $email);
error_log('DB query took: ' . $duration . 'ms');
// Send to email (not recommended for high traffic)
error_log('Critical: server out of memory', 1, 'admin@example.com');All lessons in this course
- PHP Error Types and Reporting
- Try, Catch, and Finally
- Creating Custom Exceptions
- Logging Errors and Best Practices