I'm trying to run the board locally so I can develop a plugin to link to our CMS (ultimately I want to create a new thread on the forum for each article and then display all the chat under the article, using the forum as a comments section effectively.

When I run the board using PHP's built in server (php -S localhost:8000) I get an error:

Can I cause it to be logged in any more details anywhere? The console just shows the request & nothing more.  There's nothing in the php error log or anything in uploads/logs either.

A similar post to this was posted at:

In that case, it was an issue where IPB could not connect to the mySQL server.  You might want to look at the connection info in the conf_global.php file and make sure the database user/password is correct and that that database user is assigned to the correct database.  

No, the database connection details are fine. Turns out when I created a local copy of constants.php I'd missed the <?php header off and that caused the error.

Glad to hear you got that resolved