Re: Error recovery - fatal errors

You can register a shutdown function that gets called even in the case of a fatal error. We use something like this: public function init() { register_shutdown_function(array('Bootstrap', 'fatalErrorCatcher')); ... } public function fatalErrorCatcher() { $error = error_get_last(); if( $error && ( $error['type'] === E_ERROR || $error['type'] === E_COMPILE_ERROR || $error['type'] === E_CORE_ERROR || $error['type'] === E_PARSE )) { // kill the buffer content, it's broken anyway while(ob_get_level()) { ob_end_clean(); } // log error to a file ... // issue 500 and dump out a static "site is broken oh noes!" page header('HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error'); echo file_get_contents('fail-whale.html'); } } In catchFatalError() we check the last error to see if it's truly fatal. Our general error-handler has already handled all other error types, and this since function gets called no matter how the PHP process shutsdown, you don't want to issue a 500 for a successful request. :) David