I have been developing on a Debian Apache system for a long time, for one of the projects I have been working on I had to run on a Windows Server. After installing XAMPP I noticed that by default, XAMPP sets the developer settings of Strict Standards. Meanwhile the Linux system didn’t have that enabled. I went out wanting to set the Linux server to have the Strict settings to force me to code properly. I found many places that would tell me how to disable strict standards (because users found it bothersome), but after a little searching I didn’t find a clear guide so I thought I would write one for PHP5.

1. Find “php.ini”
   • Windows (XAMPP): The file is kept under C:/xampp/php/php.ini
   • Linux: For php5 (at least in debian) /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
2. Open the file and scroll to;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
   ; Error handling and logging ;
   ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
3. The line you want to edit iserror_reporting =…
4. Copying the line below will enable strict settings, while other combinations listed below will enable different values.
   • Development Value: E_ALL | E_STRICT

My Linux box configured itself as  “error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED”, which is the standard for production.

Here is the description that comes with php.ini,

;Default Value: E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
; Development Value: E_ALL | E_STRICT
; Production Value: E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED
; http://php.net/error-reporting