Thanks for your contribution. My main motivation for the error log archive is so that if in between error log check runs, which are say every 5 minutes, a lot of errors are recorded, only the first few get emailed so as to avoid clogging up inbox space. Once the full archive is reviewed by an admin, I envisaged it more often than not being cleared, or at least moved elsewhere. You have a valid point though and particularly if a high traffic site has a lot of PHP errors, the log file could fill quite quickly.

To keep the naming of the archive file in line with the original file name (as defined by the admin), I’d suggest something like this:

$sHistoricalLogName = sprintf(‘%s.%s.archive’, ERROR_LOG_FILE, date(‘Y-m-d’));

or for monthly archives:

$sHistoricalLogName = sprintf(‘%s.%s.archive’, ERROR_LOG_FILE, date(‘Y-m’));

James

One problem I think might happen with your original script is the archive log could become big enough to crash some file systems, (over 2 gig) eventually.

I’ve changed the last section to avoid this:

/**
* We’ll copy the full content of the error log to an archive. This is useful for a number
* of reasons, not least because we are only emailing a portion of the original errors if
* the log file was larger than our given MAX_CONTENT_SIZE – there could be errors in the
* full log not included in the email.
*/
$sHistoricalLogName = ‘<>\\archive\\’ . date(‘Y-m-d’) . ‘.log’;

$sFullContent = sprintf(“—– Full content of error log as mailed @ %s —–\n%s\n”, date(‘d/m/Y H:i:s’), $sFullContent);

file_put_contents($sHistoricalLogName, $sFullContent, FILE_APPEND);

/**
* And we’re done.
*/

The script needs write permissions on the log file so that it can truncate the contents using : file_put_contents(ERROR_LOG_FILE,null);. If the user running the script doesn’t have write permissions, the script will fail to truncate the file and then the next time it runs it will send the same content all over again.

As for only sending an email when the string [ERROR] is present, I would add in some code after the line :

$sContent = $sFullContent = file_get_contents(ERROR_LOG_FILE);

that explodes $sContent on new lines creating an array with each line as an array element. I’d then iterate through those elements pattern matching for ‘[ERROR]‘ and for each line containing a match I’d add it to a new variable, perhaps $sContentMatched (.= $sMatchingLine). Once all the content has been checked, I’d then set $sContent and $sFullContent to equal $sContentMatched and then allow the script to continue as normal, though you’ll want to check that you actually have matching content first, and if not tell the script to exit.

thanks for this – i assume it will work on MySql logs just the same, however what i would like is a way that an email will be sent only when the string [ERROR] has been added to the MySql log. Also, i am not sure why in this script it needs to have WRITE permissions.

Thanks
Duddy

If you ensure PHP_errors.log.archive is in the directory the script is looking for it and the permissions on it (the file) are 0666 (read and write for all), I don’t see why there should be any problem, regardless of who owns the file. Confusingly you have said the file exists and is owned by nobody, which indicates the system has had no problem creating the error log archive file.

Without seeing your adjusted version of this script it is hard for me to comment or provide any further suggestions.

James

thanks for this script, after a little fiddling around I got it working, however there is a persistent error with the permissions when creating the log archive:

[21-Oct-2008 23:30:02] PHP Warning: file_put_contents(/home/……/PHP_errors.log.archive) [function.file-put-contents]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/……/error.log.php on line 175

I’ve chmod 0777 and tried what I can to give it correct permissions, the file is created and owned by nobody – do you know what I can do to correct this?

thanks in advance.