Whenever possible, I like to trigger the ap­pro­pri­ate HTTP status code for an error. CakePHP has a mechanism to throw 404 errors by simply calling:

<?php
$this->cakeError('error404');

This is handy when a request to a view action passes an id that doesn't ac­tu­al­lyex­ist. However, what about 403 or 500 errors? If you're like me, you probably stumbled upon AppError in the CakePHP book.

I defined a simple error403 method, and used it where ap­pro­pri­ate throughout my ap­pli­ca­tion. But when I rolled out to production, every 403 became a 404! Upon a bit of digging around in the code, I found the root of the problem in the Er­rorHan­dler con­struc­tor. In …continue.