Simplest way do get started debugging PHP (Drupal)

Hi, debugging Drupal is as easy as debugging any PHP application in fact :) there's Visual Studio plugin which adds support for PHP http://www.jcxsoftware.com/ - it is commercial unfortunately.

If you're looking for free solutions working with X-Debug I'd recommend

tsWebEditor - http://tswebeditor.tigris.org/ - free, unsupported, dead for a long time but still handles XDebug pretty well
notepad++ with XDebug plugin - http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Dev-PHP states on the website that it handles XDebug, however I was unable to get it working

well hopefully you won't be mad with mebut I'll recommend also my own IDE as well

HateML 2 - http://hateml.com/ - not 100% ready yet, but working with projects & debugger is pretty complete. What's important, I've updated it to work with latest XDebug release which broken support for "watches" feature in some old IDEs.

There are also Java-based IDEs (like mentioned Eclipse, or Aptana, NetBeans etc) however I have no experience with them as they consume way too much memory as for me

I know nothing about XDebug :-)

Olav 2010-06-10 10:28:49

The Visual Studio plugin seems to have a 30 day trial, which is good enough for me. More problematic is that the free VS versions are not listed. Also I don't know how well it works with my Apache-stacks.

Olav 2010-06-10 10:30:26

XDebug is PHP extension. It should work with any server software capable of running php. Have a look at XDebug website for details of installation (which is pretty simple, you can use pecl install xdebug or use ready binaries if running windows). Configuring for remote debugging is described in specific IDE manual, but in most cases simply setting "remote_enabled = 1" is enough.

migajek 2010-06-10 10:55:40

>Sometimes for light-weight debugging, I have found the FirePHP<So that would be the best answer to my question I guess (To get quickly started)

Olav 2010-06-10 10:27:39

well FirePHP is not really a debugger, it's kind of logging system ... "Real" debuggers tend to have execution control (breakpoints, step in/out, continue) and ALL variables preview, including expression evaluator.

migajek 2010-06-10 10:57:09

I am well aware of that firePHP is suited for logging specific, known variables, but it's really handle to have it available and drop it into an existing app and just call firePHP whenever it's needed to trace specific variables through firefox. 9 out of 10 times in the past I have not needed either breakpoints or any of the other features that xDebug offers, except the possibility of following the changes of a variable throughout execution. If you think that you are in the need of accessing breakpoints, stepping around in code, then you'll definitely need Xdebug as michal said.

Industrial 2010-06-10 13:17:23

I see there is also FireDrupal..Anyway it seems you have to change the source, and there is no drupal module doing it, otherwise it sound like a interesting thing, but should compare it to Drupal debug-modules

Olav 2010-06-10 14:03:23

Hi! That's true, you need to integrate the firePHP library somewhere. Thats another downside to it. I like to keep it integrated all the time though, it have saved my ass many times :) Here's a link for you. I do not have any drupal knowledge, so I can't tell if it's working or not, but it should get you started: http://www.balancedscale.com/blog/200903/installing-firephp-drupal

Industrial 2010-06-10 14:57:05

Found this one as well: http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=113141 - "Put fb.php into the devel directory and you can start calling fb() to log information to firebug." Sounds really easy :)

Industrial 2010-06-10 14:58:11

It's kind of var_dump, except that it sends the output to a separate firefox window, isn't it? :)

migajek 2010-06-11 00:25:59

ansaurus

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Simplest way do get started debugging PHP (Drupal)

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