Setting up Xdebug for PHP

So as part of my fight with the white screen of death I ended up setting up Xdebug which proved very useful. Installation is pretty straight forward actually just follow the guide

Quick highlights

pecl install xdebug

At the end it will tell you what to add to your php.ini file

For example

You should add "zend_extension=/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20131226/xdebug.so" to php.ini

Restart apache and Xdebug should be installed

Next is setting it up so a client can connect for that you need to add settings for remote debugging so in your php.ini add something like the below

zend_extension=/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20131226/xdebug.so
xdebug.remote_enable=true
xdebug.remote_host=192.168.208.95
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.remote_autostart=1

The 192.168.208.95 is your client machine where you will be running the debug client.

I then needed a simple client to connect to the debugger I found MacGDBp which does the job nicely for now. So opening that up, make sure it’s listening on the same port as the php server and going to the site should trigger a debug session and you can step through the code and inspect variables etc…

Next step is to have this automatically set up in the docker containers I’ve been playing with