OpenCart 1.5.x Internal Server Error 500

Posted by Paul on January 11, 2013

We've seen a problem recently which will cause an OpenCart website to suddenly start causing an internal server error.

The error happens without warning and without any changes being made on the website. You'll know if this could be the error you're seeing because you won't see any sort of Apache or PHP error. An Apache error would be something like a 404 or "redirect loop detected" and a PHP error could be pretty much anything but there would usually be the path to a file and a description of the error.

However, if this is the problem you're having you'll see "Internal Server Error" the code 500 and it will ask you to email the webmaster but there won't be any information about what the error actually is.

Well, we tracked this one down and it appears to be that if one of the log files in OpenCart becomes larger than 2GB and PHP isn't configured to handle files over this size then you will get this Internal Server Error and no other information - which makes it hard to trace!

So if you're seeing this issue, first check the file size of:
/system/logs/error.txt
/system/logs/error-new.txt 

Hopefully that will save someone else the trouble of tracking down this unspecified error!

[Update 2016-03-04]
To avoid this problem altogether, install Antropy's Error Log Trimmer extension now!

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