Introduction ¶

During development for TYPO3 you often run into Exceptions. They do not look very nice. A much nicer alternative might be whoops which @dk2kde told me about. It will not only handle exceptions, but also PHP Errors like syntax errors.

In this small blog post I will show you how to use whoops as exception handler for TYPO3 projects during local development.

Install dependencies ¶

First of all you have to install the filp/whoops package. Also I recommend to install symfony/var-dumper. Only with both packages you will see arguments in stack traces.

To install both run the following in your terminal:

composer global require filp/whoops
composer global require symfony/var-dumper

Configure TYPO3 ¶

Afterwards you can configure TYPO3 to use the new exception handler. Therefore insert the following in your typo3conf/AdditionalConfiguration.php. Of course you have to update line 4 to match your installation path:

call_user_func(function ($exceptionHandling = 'whoops') {
    // Use whoops error handler for errors.
    if ($exceptionHandling === 'whoops') {
        require_once '/Users/siepmann/.composer/vendor/autoload.php';
        $handler = null;
        if (defined('TYPO3_cliMode') && TYPO3_cliMode) {
            // $handler = new \Whoops\Handler\PlainTextHandler();
        } else {
            $handler = new \Whoops\Handler\PrettyPageHandler();
            $handler->setApplicationPaths([
                'web' => realpath(PATH_site . '../web'),
                'typo3' => realpath(PATH_site . '../vendor/typo3/cms'),
                'typo3conf' => realpath(PATH_site . 'typo3conf'),
            ]);
        }
        if ($handler !== null) {
            $whoops = new \Whoops\Run;
            $whoops->pushHandler($handler);
            $whoops->register();
        }
    }
    if ($exceptionHandling === 'xdebug' || $exceptionHandling === 'whoops') {
        // Disable original handler to use whoops or xdebug
        $GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['SYS']['productionExceptionHandler'] = '';
        $GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['SYS']['debugExceptionHandler'] = '';
        $GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['SYS']['errorHandler'] = '';
    }
});

With this setup you will get the new exception handler for web requests.

On CLI I recommend to use typo3cms which will use Symfony stack traces anyway.

Configuration options ¶

To switch to the handler of xdebug, exchange whoops on line 1 with xdebug. To use the original TYPO3 handler insert something else, e.g. TYPO3.

Also you might want to adjust the application paths to your setup. All paths listed as values in that array will be filterable as application in stack trace.

Further reading ¶

• http://filp.github.io/whoops/