Handling Errors

Yii includes a built-in error handler which makes error handling a much more pleasant experience than before. In particular, the Yii error handler does the following to improve error handling:

• All non-fatal PHP errors (e.g. warnings, notices) are converted into catchable exceptions.
• Exceptions and fatal PHP errors are displayed with detailed call stack information and source code lines in debug mode.
• Supports using a dedicated controller action to display errors.
• Supports different error response formats.

The error handler is enabled by default. You may disable it by defining the constant YII_ENABLE_ERROR_HANDLER to be false in the entry script of your application.

Using Error Handler

The error handler is registered as an application component named errorHandler. You may configure it in the application configuration like the following:

return [
    'components' => [
        'errorHandler' => [
            'maxSourceLines' => 20,
        ],
    ],
];

With the above configuration, the number of source code lines to be displayed in exception pages will be up to 20.

As aforementioned, the error handler turns all non-fatal PHP errors into catchable exceptions. This means you can use the following code to deal with PHP errors:

use Yii;
use yii\base\ErrorException;

try {
    10/0;
} catch (ErrorException $e) {
    Yii::warning("Division by zero.");
}

// execution continues...

If you want to show an error page telling the user that his request is invalid or unexpected, you may simply throw an HTTP exception, such as yii\web\NotFoundHttpException. The error handler will correctly set the HTTP status code of the response and use an appropriate error view to display the error message.

use yii\web\NotFoundHttpException;

throw new NotFoundHttpException();

Customizing Error Display

The error handler adjusts the error display according to the value of the constant YII_DEBUG. When YII_DEBUG is true (meaning in debug mode), the error handler will display exceptions with detailed call stack information and source code lines to help easier debugging. And when YII_DEBUG is false, only the error message will be displayed to prevent revealing sensitive information about the application.

Info: If an exception is a descendant of yii\base\UserException, no call stack will be displayed regardless the value of YII_DEBUG. This is because such exceptions are considered to be caused by user mistakes and the developers do not need to fix anything.

By default, the error handler displays errors using two views:

• @yii/views/errorHandler/error.php: used when errors should be displayed WITHOUT call stack information. When YII_DEBUG is false, this is the only error view to be displayed.
• @yii/views/errorHandler/exception.php: used when errors should be displayed WITH call stack information.

You can configure the errorView and exceptionView properties of the error handler to use your own views to customize the error display.

Using Error Actions

A better way of customizing the error display is to use dedicated error actions. To do so, first configure the errorAction property of the errorHandler component like the following:

return [
    'components' => [
        'errorHandler' => [
            'errorAction' => 'site/error',
        ],
    ]
];

The errorAction property takes a route to an action. The above configuration states that when an error needs to be displayed without call stack information, the site/error action should be executed.

You can create the site/error action as follows,

namespace app\controllers;

use Yii;
use yii\web\Controller;

class SiteController extends Controller
{
    public function actions()
    {
        return [
            'error' => [
                'class' => 'yii\web\ErrorAction',
            ],
        ];
    }
}

The above code defines the error action using the yii\web\ErrorAction class which renders an error using a view named error.

Besides using yii\web\ErrorAction, you may also define the error action using an action method like the following,

public function actionError()
{
    $exception = Yii::$app->errorHandler->exception;
    if ($exception !== null) {
        return $this->render('error', ['exception' => $exception]);
    }
}

You should now create a view file located at views/site/error.php. In this view file, you can access the following variables if the error action is defined as yii\web\ErrorAction:

• name: the name of the error;
• message: the error message;
• exception: the exception object through which you can retrieve more useful information, such as HTTP status code, error code, error call stack, etc.

Info: If you are using the basic project template or the advanced project template, the error action and the error view are already defined for you.

Note: If you need to redirect in an error handler, do it the following way:

Yii::$app->getResponse()->redirect($url)->send();
return;

Customizing Error Response Format

The error handler displays errors according to the format setting of the response. If the response format is html, it will use the error or exception view to display errors, as described in the last subsection. For other response formats, the error handler will assign the array representation of the exception to the yii\web\Response::$data property which will then be converted to different formats accordingly. For example, if the response format is json, you may see the following response:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2014 05:31:43 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.26 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.4.20 mod_ssl/2.2.26 OpenSSL/0.9.8y
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8

{
    "name": "Not Found Exception",
    "message": "The requested resource was not found.",
    "code": 0,
    "status": 404
}

You may customize the error response format by responding to the beforeSend event of the response component in the application configuration:

return [
    // ...
    'components' => [
        'response' => [
            'class' => 'yii\web\Response',
            'on beforeSend' => function ($event) {
                $response = $event->sender;
                if ($response->data !== null) {
                    $response->data = [
                        'success' => $response->isSuccessful,
                        'data' => $response->data,
                    ];
                    $response->statusCode = 200;
                }
            },
        ],
    ],
];

The above code will reformat the error response like the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2014 05:31:43 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.26 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.4.20 mod_ssl/2.2.26 OpenSSL/0.9.8y
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8

{
    "success": false,
    "data": {
        "name": "Not Found Exception",
        "message": "The requested resource was not found.",
        "code": 0,
        "status": 404
    }
}