How I Debugged a phpMyAdmin 500 Error While Importing a Large SQL File on Laragon

I recently ran into a weird issue while working on a Laravel project on Windows using Laragon . Everything was working fine until I tried to import a database through phpMyAdmin. Instead of an SQL error, phpMyAdmin simply returned: Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration... No useful message. Just HTTP 500. My SQL file was around 97 MB , so at first I thought it was probably a PHP upload limit issue. It wasn't that simple. Here is how I debugged it. 1. Check which PHP configuration is actually running From Laragon Terminal: php --ini Then I checked the important error settings: php.exe -r "echo 'error_log=' . ini_get('error_log') . PHP_EOL;" php.exe -r "echo 'log_errors=' . ini_get('log_errors') . PHP_EOL;" php.exe -r "echo 'display_errors=' . ini_get('display_errors') . PHP_EOL;" My output was: error_log=D:/C-data/laragon/tmp/php_errors.log log_errors=1 display_errors=1 One small Laragon/Git Bash issue I also found was: type php returned: php is aliased to `winpty php.exe' Because of that, commands like: php -i | grep ... sometimes returned: stdout is not a tty Using php.exe directly avoids that problem. 2. Check the PHP error log My PHP error log was: D:/C-data/laragon/tmp/php_errors.log I reproduced the import error and checked it: tail -n 50 /d/C-data/laragon/tmp/php_errors.log Nothing useful appeared. That was an important clue. 3. Make sure browser PHP and CLI PHP use the same php.ini I created a temporary file: <?php phpinfo (); Then opened it through the browser. Important values were: Server API: CGI/FastCGI PHP Version: 8.4.4 Loaded Configuration File: D:\C-data\laragon\bin\php\php-8.4.4-nts-Win32-vs17-x64\php.ini My PHP limits were already high enough: upload_max_filesize = 512M post_max_size = 512M memory_limit = 512M max_execution_time = 36000 So the 97 MB SQL file should have been allowed by PHP. 4. Check Apache logs I located the Apache error log with: grep -Ri "ErrorLog" /d/C-data/laragon/etc/apache2 /d/C-da