How can testing on a production system affect error reporting and debugging in PHP scripts, and what are the alternatives for proper testing environments?

Testing on a production system can affect error reporting and debugging in PHP scripts because errors and warnings may be displayed to users, potentially exposing sensitive information. To avoid this, it is recommended to set error reporting to a minimal level in production environments and use proper testing environments, such as development or staging servers, for testing.

// Set error reporting level to minimal in production environment
if (getenv('ENVIRONMENT') === 'production') {
    error_reporting(0);
}