Disable fancy errors in CakePHP

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July 21, 2009

Here at work we often go crazy because of CakePHP's "helpful" displaying of error messages.

They are littered with HTML and, even worse, Javascript and provide an often superfluous stack trace, which makes it harder to read the actual error message.

If you just want readable, plain text error messages in your projects, add the following to /app/config/bootstrap.php:

function displayErrorWithoutCrap() {
	// returning false here means the internal PHP error handler will take over again and display a neat, clean error
	return false;
}
set_error_handler('displayErrorWithoutCrap');

And if the Cake guys could make this configurable in their next release, that would just be awesome.