The PHP error log has stopped working. It did work

Question

It's been working for ages and stopped. I must be missing something obvious.

File /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini relevant settings are:

display_errors = On  (I am not sure if this makes a difference)
log_errors = On
error_log = "/var/www/error_log.log"

In my code I have:

echo 'About to log';
error_log('An error');

I see "About to log" on the page, but nothing in the error log. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

Restart the Web server. Until you do php.ini changes are not considered.

Also, if you want to track PHP errors, you need to have track_errors=On and error_reporting=E_ALL, although that is not related with error_log calls. Also make sure that the error log file is writeable by the Web server user.

Answer 2

It ended up being permission issues. The file grew too big to open quickly, so I deleted and recreated it, but with read-only permissions.

I totally forgot I deleted it. What a pain.

Answer 3

In my php.ini file (XAMPP default), there was a second entry for error_log overriding the one that I had set.

So if the other answers do not work for you too, search again for multiple entries of the necessary settings.