I’m having a strange issue where my PHP application works fine on my local machine yet breaks on the production server. The HTML output is getting escaped and appears as plain text instead of being rendered correctly.
In my development environment, everything displays properly with correct HTML rendering. However, when deployed to production, all the HTML tags are escaped and shown as literal text on the page.
I suspect this issue began after I tried to install some Rust tools on the server using a curl command. I also adjusted Apache proxy settings to try and get Rust functioning with my existing PHP application, which was probably a mistake.
I have already attempted to remove the Apache modules I added and deleted the configuration lines from my configuration files, but the issue persists.
Reviewing the HTTP headers reveals some differences between production and local. Production shows content-encoding: gzip and content-length: 1474, while local shows content-length: 4540 without gzip encoding.
The production server operates on Apache 2.4.41 on Ubuntu, while my local setup uses Apache 2.4.46 on Windows with PHP 8.0.2.
How can I resolve this so my production server renders HTML properly, similar to my local environment? Both setups are using the same code base, so it must be a server configuration issue.
What configuration files should I examine or what additional details do you need to assist me in troubleshooting this?
looks like your php.ini got messed up somehow, maybe when you tried those Rust tools. check if functions like htmlspecialchars are running where they shouldn’t be. and that gzip difference is odd – double-check your .htaccess for any new compression rules that might’ve slipped in.
hmm, weird issue. check if auto_prepend_file or auto_append_file changed in your php.ini when you set up Rust - those can inject code that messes with output. also, what php version are you running in production vs locally? different versions sometimes handle output differently even with identical code.
It seems you’re dealing with a character encoding or output buffering issue. Notably, the content-length discrepancy and the gzip encoding in production could be contributing factors. I recommend examining your PHP configuration files, focusing on settings like output_buffering, zlib.output_compression, and default_charset. This is crucial because mismatches between your local and production settings can lead to HTML escaping issues. I’ve encountered similar problems after adjusting server configurations; often, it boils down to specific PHP directives or Apache modules that have not been completely removed. To confirm the loaded modules, execute php -m and apache2ctl -M on both environments and ensure they match up. Remember, in some cases, modules can remain active even if you think you’ve disabled them, unless you’ve performed a thorough Apache restart.