PHP is very configurable, but sometimes default settings or those imposed by the framework in use tend to make simple debugging very difficult.

Don’t get me wrong, whenever possible a proper PHP Debugger (extension) is the way to go, but sometimes, when all else fails and you’re facing a blank white page, the snippet below can get you out of the situation in no time.

So, how does it work? While a long time have passed since I first wrote it, little changed in the way it works.

As you might know, in PHP you can register a shutdown handler – a function to be called when PHP is closing down. What you might not know is that this function is called no matter what; even when fatal errors come up. The only exception is if an existing shutdown handler decides to kill the remaining handlers from executing (which is usually rare).

This functionality makes it a good candidate for retrieving interesting information on the current page run, such as:

• where the initial output started from (useful to find files that cause PHP to start the output)
• last error message (useful to see fatal errors)
• the loaded files (useful to find which file caused PHP to stop)

All this is conveniently rendered inside an HTML comment to (hopefully) prevent any end-user from seeing anything out of the ordinary. Of course, use this script with care, it may easily tell too much about your server to the world!