Better PHP Development

Chapter 2: Getting to Know and Love Xdebug

by Bruno Škvorc

It's been 15 years since Xdebug first came out. We think this is the perfect opportunity to re-introduce it to the world, and explain how and why it does what it does.

Xdebug is a PHP extension (meaning it needs to be compiled and installed into a PHP installation) which provides the developer with some features for debugging. They include:

• stack traces - detailed output of the path the application took to reach a given error, including parameters passed to functions, in order to easily track the error down.
• a prettier var_dump output which produces color coded information and structured views, similar to VarDumper, along with a a super-globals dumper
• a profiler for finding out where ...