How can I create an error 404 in PHP?
The up-to-date answer (as of PHP 5.4 or newer) for generating 404 pages is to use http_response_code:
<?phphttp_response_code(404);include('my_404.php'); // provide your own HTML for the error pagedie();die() is not strictly necessary, but it makes sure that you don't continue the normal execution.
What you're doing will work, and the browser will receive a 404 code. What it won't do is display the "not found" page that you might be expecting, e.g.:
Not Found
The requested URL /test.php was not found on this server.
That's because the web server doesn't send that page when PHP returns a 404 code (at least Apache doesn't). PHP is responsible for sending all its own output. So if you want a similar page, you'll have to send the HTML yourself, e.g.:
<?phpheader($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"]." 404 Not Found", true, 404);include("notFound.php");?>You could configure Apache to use the same page for its own 404 messages, by putting this in httpd.conf:
ErrorDocument 404 /notFound.php