I'm trying to learn CodeIgniter, and I'm constantly running into "500, Internal Server Error". So far, I've learned that that usually means I have a typo somewhere, but it still is kind of hard to find the typo because it doesn't tell you where it is.
Is there a way that I can tell CodeIgniter to tell me what's wrong rather than making Apache throw a "500, Internal Server Error"? I'm an intermediate PHP programmer, and I've thrown more 500 errors in the past two days with CodeIgniter than I have since I started coding PHP! Can I get CodeIgniter to tell me the syntax errors rather than having Apache give me 500s?
I wish I could give credit to Lawrence Cherone, because his comment really helped me solve my problem.
I started looking in the access and error logs and started finding what my errors were quite quickly. When I ran into those 500 errors, it solved my problems by looking at the apache2 logs.
It seems like these errors are caused by the CI function show_error($message, $status=500). CI itself has a custom 500 error page, which does include any php errors that caused the 500 response (assuming of course your error reporting is turned on in php.ini and the CI ENVIRONMENT constant is not set to 'production').
If you are getting a generic 500 error page, it would seem that some setting in Apache is overriding the custom page sent by CI. As @safarov suggested try checking you Apache config or .htaccess files for an explicit 500 error response.