In my opinion, the best thing about working in the development phase is the liberty to throw your errors to the browser, without too many worries of prying eyes. Once your project is live, however, these errors can be very risky business and naturally they should be supressed. This carries with it the disadvantage of complicating the debugging process if something goes wrong. One great way to suppress these demons, without losing any valuable information, is to log your errors to a private file on the server.

In this article I will show you a very basic way of logging to your own file using PHP's logging functions. It is intended only as a start and by no means a complete thesis on logging as a whole. I intend to continue the discussion in follow up articles as time allows, so please check back often.