The error_log directive in /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/error-logging.ini does not make any difference

[siddjain]

The wordpress:php7.4-fpm-alpine image comes with following file. ref:

bash-5.0# cat /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/error-logging.ini
error_reporting = E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE | E_CORE_ERROR | E_CORE_WARNING | E_COMPILE_ERROR | E_COMPILE_WARNING | E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR
display_errors = Off
display_startup_errors = Off
log_errors = On
error_log = /dev/stderr
log_errors_max_len = 1024
ignore_repeated_errors = On
ignore_repeated_source = Off
html_errors = Off

According to official PHP documentation:

message is sent to PHP's system logger, using the Operating System's system logging mechanism or a file, depending on what the error_log configuration directive is set to. This is the default option.

except that we haven't seen this work in practice. We changed the error_log to /var/www/html/wp-content/test.log but log messages are still written to /var/www/html/wp-content/debug.log which is the default location of WP_DEBUG_LOG. we thought maybe this is happening because the file does not exist so we created the file and even chown the permissions to make www-data the owner but still no luck. Has anyone experienced this?

[tianon]

My guess is that https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/fc6e4cbe3ef1dcd3a9977272d7ddcc413acdde0d/wp-includes/load.php#L446-L469 is related -- have you set WORDPRESS_DEBUG?

[siddjain]

Yes that explains it. Thanks a lot @tianon !