How can I get php to return 500 upon encountering a fatal exception?

header("HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error");

This is exactly the problem I had yesterday and I found solution as follows:

1) first of all, you need to catch PHP fatal errors, which is error type E_ERROR. when this error occurs, script will be stored the error and terminate execution. you can get the stored error by calling function error_get_last().

2) before script terminated, a callback function register_shutdown_function() will always be called. so you need to register a error handler by this function to do what you want, in this case, return header 500 and a customized internal error page (optional).

function my_error_handler(){  $last_error = error_get_last();  if ($last_error && $last_error['type']==E_ERROR)      {        header("HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error");        echo '...';//html for 500 page      }}register_shutdown_function('my_error_handler');

Note: if you want to catch custom error type, which start with E_USER*, you can use function set_error_handler() to register error handler and trigger error by function trigger_error, however, this error handler can not handle E_ERROR error type. see explanation on php.net about error handler

I have used "set_exception_handler" to handle uncaught exceptions.

function handleException($ex) {      error_log("Uncaught exception class=" . get_class($ex) . " message=" . $ex->getMessage() . " line=" . $ex->getLine());      ob_end_clean(); # try to purge content sent so far      header('HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error');      echo 'Internal error';    }set_exception_handler('handleException');