Smarty

[df444]

Hi, I'm new to Smarty as a developer. I did used Smarty on templates before a bit here and there. But now I was assigned with a task to upgrade an app. I decided I will keep using Smarty. The app is using Smarty 2 and of course the first thing I did was upgrade it to the latest 3 version. This works fine while running under the latest PHP 5 branch

But once I switch the application to PHP 7, I just get blank pages. This happens both with Smarty 2 or 3. I assume 2 is not compatible with PHP 7, reason why I want to upgrade and because its old. The problem is that since this seems to be an issue with Smarty I don't get any PHP errors at all. I checked the web server, I turned all errors displays on PHP to on, and even executing the file from the command line outputs nothing, no errors. Just a blank white screen with no output.

The reason seems to be that in the templates_c folder no files are compiled when setting PHP 7 on the server, but works when using 5. I know the PHP code is legacy and this is what I need to do, upgrade the PHP code, but I cannot do this without making Smarty work first in order to see the errors and start fixing it.

Is there a way to log what is happening with Smarty and why its failing without any log outputs? I would expect to see PHP errors logged but it seems this is not happening.

[df444]

It seems this is not smarty tapping into my output.

While Smarty does not write to the templates_c (I will check that issue later since its not a permission issue) at least I managed to show the PHP errors finally!!!

I imagined smarty was causing this but not. It seems the previous developer decided to suppress errors on the code and use error_reporting to 0 on a lot of files. That was the reason I was not getting any errors what so ever.

Why in the world he was using 0 on a production code is beyond me, probably to hide the issues...

I assume if there is a smarty error in the future it would just display on the PHP error log as usual.

[AnrDaemon]

Do you use PHP-FPM or Apache module?
You can force error_reporting on SAPI level, but configuration is slightly different, depending on SAPI.