How can I get php to return 500 upon encountering a fatal exception?

Question

PHP fatal errors come back as status code 200 to the HTTP client. How can I make it return a status code 500 (Internal server error)?

Answer 1

You would have to catch the thrown error using try/catch and then use that catch block to send a header() with the 500 error.

try {
    ...badcode...
    throw new Exception('error');

} catch (Exception $e) {

    header("Status: 500 Server Error");
    var_dump($e->getMessage());
}

If the fatal exception is not surrounded by try {} catch blocks then you must register a global handler and use register_shutdown_function() to check for an error at script end.