Why is my PHP application rendering HTML incorrectly in production but working fine locally?

Frontend
1

I’m having a weird issue with my PHP app. It works great on my local machine but acts up in production. The production server is spitting out raw HTML instead of rendering it properly.

I think I messed things up when I tried to set up some Rust stuff. I used a curl command to install Rust and played around with Apache reverse proxies. Now I’m stuck with this problem.

I’ve tried removing the Apache mods and cleaning up my config files, but no luck. The error is still there.

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

  1. Production server response has content-type: text/html
  2. Local server response has content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
  3. Production uses Apache 2.4.41 on Ubuntu
  4. Local uses Apache 2.4.46 on Windows with PHP 8.0.2

Any ideas on how to fix this? Could it be something in my Apache config or maybe related to that Rust install? What should I check next?

// Example of how the PHP might be outputting HTML
function getNewNoteView() {
    $html = '<div class="note-container">';
    $html .= '<h2>New Note</h2>';
    $html .= '<textarea id="note-content"></textarea>';
    $html .= '<button onclick="saveNote()">Save</button>';
    $html .= '</div>';
    return $html;
}
2

yo finn, sounds like a headache! ever thought bout checkin ur .htaccess file? sometimes it can mess with content types. also, make sure ur php is actually processin files n not just sendin em as-is. u might wanna double-check ur apache’s php module config too. rust stuff probs unrelated, but who knows?

3

hey there! have you checked ur php.ini settings? sometimes production configs can mess with output buffering or content encoding. maybe try adding header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8'); at the start of ur script? also, did u make sure all necessary php modules are enabled on the production server? jus curious, what made u wanna play with Rust alongside PHP?

4

I encountered a similar issue when deploying a PHP application. Have you verified that mod_php is properly installed and configured on your production server? Sometimes, Apache fails to process PHP files if the module isn’t set up correctly. Additionally, check your Apache’s configuration files, particularly the directives, to ensure they’re not interfering with PHP execution. It might also be worth comparing the phpinfo() output between your local and production environments to spot any significant differences in configuration or loaded extensions.