Php – best practice for log level in PHP

PHPprogramming practices

When programming in C, I often get the advice to turn on many or all warnings and not ignore warnings.

Does the same hold in PHP, should I enable all warnings in the PHP log?

Best Answer

Default log level for PHP excludes notices, ie. it's E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE for PHP 5.2, E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_STRICT for 5.3 and E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_STRICT & ~E_DEPRECATED for 5.4.

If you're working only with your code, then you're much better off setting it to E_ALL. Seeing notices will save you lot of debugging time, seeing deprecation and compatibility notices, will save you a lot of pain upgrading to newer PHP.

However, if you're working with third party code, turning on all notices (E_NOTICE, E_STRICT and E_DEPRECATED) can lead to spamming of your log, as a lot of older code will generate a notice every few lines of code.

Related Solutions

Php – Is declaring fields on classes actually harmful in PHP

You should always declare your class properties ahead of time. While PHP is a dynamic language and will happily go right along with you creating your properties at runtime, there are several downsides to this path.

The compiler can optimize declared properties. When you dynamically declare a property this is a performance hit as the compiler has to create a dynamic hash table to store your dynamic properties.
I'm not 100% on this one but I believe that bytecode optimizers like APC won't be as useful since they won't have a full picture of your class. (And optimizers like APC are a must)
Makes your code 1000x harder to read. People will hate you.
Makes it 1000x more likely that you will make a mistake. (Was it getId or getID? Wait, you used both. Fail.)
No IDE autocompleting or type hinting.
Documentation generators won't see your property.

The problem you described is actually a minor one when compared to the problem of not declaring your properties in your class definition. Here's a good solution.

Get used to declaring defaults for your properties.

private $testField = null;
private $testField = '';
private $testField = 0;
private $testField = []; //array()
private $testField = false;

Except for properties that will be storing objects, this will cover the majority of base types that you will be storing. The properties that will be storing objects can be set in your constructor.

A good rule for class design is that after your object has been created and your constructor has run you shouldn't have any properties out there "undefined".

PHP Namespace – Best Practices for Using Namespaces in Libraries

As GordonM mentioned in the comment, you should break it up to something along the lines of

\Vendor\Package\ClassName

So maybe for your cache library it would be something along the lines of

\SG\Cache\CacheClass

Directory structures usually mirror the above. So it'd be located in /SG/Cache/CacheClass.php of your root directory. If you're using a particular framework there should be some documentation on namespace usage for the framework.

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Related Solutions

Php – Is declaring fields on classes actually harmful in PHP

PHP Namespace – Best Practices for Using Namespaces in Libraries

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