PHP on CentOS generating blank page, no errors

Question

My sysadmin setup a virtual server using CentOS, PHP and Apache. All seems correctly installed: I get the Apache welcome page, I can find PHP using which php as well as yum list installed *php*.

I can also put a file testing1.html in /var/www/html/ and see html content on a browser.

But when creating a file testing2.php containing <? phpinfo(); ?> I try to access it via browser and get a blank page.

The Apache log says

[23/Oct/2015:09:27:13 -0400] "GET /testing2.php HTTP/1.1" 200 16 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_1) AppleWebKit/601.2.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.1 Safari/601.2.7" 

which doesn't really help me figure out what's wrong.

Folder permissions are 755 and file permissions are 644.

Any suggestions on how to begin troubleshooting this?

Answer 1

Looking at the contents of the test PHP file (<? phpinfo(); ?>) I suspect that your php.ini doesn't have short-open-tag enabled.

To fix this, you have two options.

1. Change the contents of your code to:
   <?php phpinfo(); ?>

2. Enable short-open-tag in php.ini.

The preferred approach would be the first, in accrodance with PHP:

PHP also allows for short open tag <​? (which is discouraged since it is only available if enabled using the short_open_tag php.ini configuration file directive, or if PHP was configured with the --enable-short-tags option).