Whoops VS ray

To get the full control of the error output (or, rather, of the error message handling) I would suggest to use an exception handling function, set_exception_handler() I've got an example in my article on PHP error reporting. There, instead of just spitting out the raw exception, you can use the Exception class methods to get the relevant parts and either log or echo them out, depends on the server role. Or you can even include a library like Whoops that dramatically improves the output.

Check out spatie/laravel-ignition (if using Laravel) or filp/whoops

I've been using whoops but it's a bit stale (not even 7.x or 8.x native, just compatible with those but still very much 5.x code). Might have to explore ignition.

To give an example of what I am looking for, there is this library for PHPT: http://filp.github.io/whoops/

You're correct about it being a faulty webpage, but that's now what any browsers devtools look like. What you're seeing here is a whoops error page from an older version of Laravel.

Debugging is pretty easy with something like Ray (https://myray.app/) or Laravel Herd (https://herd.laravel.com/, despite its name runs differnet php apps just fine).

When it coems to running different PHP versions, modern PHP development has largely moved to using Docker (ddev, for example: https://ddev.com/) for that, and there's plenty Docker images for old PHP versions so it's a non-issue. I'd also imagine it be difficult to get many other outdated programming languages via a package manager.

There's now the PHP Foundation, which while relatively new in its formation, has significantly boosted PHP development and I'd recommend donating if improving the language is important to you.

I'm using Ray (https://myray.app/) from spatie, it's easy to install (composer) and is doing all I need :)

https://myray.app/ (when not xdebugging)

Similar but not free: https://myray.app

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "Ray"

testimonials gone wrong at myray.app

I'm proud to announce the initial release of the spatie/x-ray package for Ray. The x-ray package provides a command-line utility that finds and displays all calls to ray(), rd(), and other functions from the spatie/ray family of packages. Currently, it only supports PHP projects.