Producing an Error

Improving error handling

As soon as we started using a PHP server to serve .php scripts in Serving PHP Scripts, we had to worry about errors and showing them in the browser. We mentioned back then that you need to make a distinction between the website as it is still running on your own computer and the website as it is running on a publicly accessible server. You may find that people talk about this distinction in different ways.

• When you’re working on your website on your own computer, you’re running it “locally”, or on your “development server”.
• When it runs on a publicly accessible server, it has been “deployed” to the “production server”.

We use different words here because these are different contexts or environments, and there will be some differences in server configuration and behavior of the website depending on whether it runs locally or on the production server. In this chapter, we will improve the way our website handles errors depending on the environment in which the website runs.