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how to Figure Out Why My PHP 8.1 Application is Throwing a 500 scenarios on Redirects

šŸ‘€ Views: 2 šŸ’¬ Answers: 1 šŸ“… Created: 2025-06-06
php http-headers apache debugging PHP

I'm having a hard time understanding I'm prototyping a solution and I'm reviewing some code and I'm working on a personal project and I'm working with a frustrating scenario with my PHP 8.1 application where I get a 500 Internal Server behavior every time I attempt to perform a redirect using the `header()` function... I have verified that my output buffering is working correctly and that there are no preceding echoes or print statements before the call to `header()`. Here's a snippet of what I'm currently doing: ```php <?php session_start(); // Some logic here if ($someCondition) { header('Location: /new-page.php'); exit(); } ?> ``` I've tried using both `exit()` and `die()` immediately after the header call, but the behavior continues. The web server's behavior logs do not provide much insight, only indicating `PHP Fatal behavior: Uncaught behavior: Call to undefined function` followed by a reference to a function from a third-party library I’m using, which I’m not even calling in this part of the code. I've also checked for any syntax errors using `php -l` on the file, and it doesn't report anything wrong. My development environment is using Apache 2.4 with mod_rewrite enabled. Is it possible that some misconfiguration in my Apache setup is causing this scenario, or could there be something deeper in my application that I am overlooking? Any suggestions on how to debug this further would be greatly appreciated. For context: I'm using Php on Ubuntu. Is there a better approach? The project is a REST API built with Php. Am I missing something obvious? This is happening in both development and production on Windows 11. Thanks for any help you can provide!