You may already have used debugging tools that simply connect to a remote server or a process of your application. XDebug works over the protocol that requires your local machine to listen for incoming connections from a server where an application you are debugging is located. XDebug differs from other debugging tools you may be familiar with. We will see later how to compile and install this extension. Xdebug is a PHP extension, that is loaded dynamically as a shared library (.so), therefore before using it you need to compile it.

Understanding Xdebugįirst of all we need to understand how does the XDebug debugger work. In case of using var_dump(), print_r() statements you are not only providing visitors a ton of scary information, but you are also risking to have your sensitive data be exposed. One important reason to start using XDebug is debugging in production. I won’t cover all benefits and features of XDebug, there is enough information already provided. Personally, I always try to understand how something works under the hood and I think that worth it in any case. The main intention of this article is to explain how does XDebug work and what problems I’ve encountered while configuring it for my projects. There are lot of articles out there, however I remember the time when I have tried several times to configure Xdebug, unfortunately all attempts failed because of the lack of understanding how all these tools work under the hood. Using Xdebug together with PHPStorm makes debugging much easier. Furthermore, tracing a path of a function call can be a really tedious task. This is caused by a huge code base of the Magento platform as a result use of caching everywhere where it is possible or not. When you have a simple application there is not really need to spend time on configuring Xdebug, you can go along with dumping varialbes, however in such applications and frameworks like Magento it is really hard to debug using var_dump statements. Xdebug is a great way to eliminate var_dump(), print_r() statements and make your PHP debugging experience better and more productive.

Phpstorm xdebug not working