Skip to content

Running Contao 3.x version and upgrading from PHP 5.x to PHP 7 results in a 500 Status?

I had the joy to debug a not working contao system line by line.

Why line by line? Because there was no entry in any logs, even with "log all motherfucker"-php.ini values on.

After parsing the lines, I ended up into this error message.

Fatal error: Cannot use 'String' as class name as it is reserved in ... system/modules/core/library/Contao/String.php on line 28

Well, nice to know the error but where was this triggered? So another round with joy and I ended up with an extension, of course installed "by hand" which means not possible to update by the contao updater and this lovely line.

$this->import('String');

After I've changed that line to the following line, all the gizmos where working again.

$this->import('StringUtils');

So, what should you do when you where faced with a 500 Apache Status Code after a contao installation moved from an PHP 5.x runtime environment to a PHP 7.x runtime environment?

cd <project root> grep -ir "import('String');" *

Replace >>import('String');<< with >>import('StringUtil');<< and that is it.

But all would be better if you are not installing extensions by hand.