I make use of PhpStorm to build my PHP applications. It has a really nifty concept of Zero-Configuration Debugging when it comes to debugging your PHP scripts. From what I understand, it basically opens up a port on your development machine, and listens for incoming XDebug connections.
I’ve found that there are times that I need to very quickly debug a PHP CLI script from the command line, but I don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a debug configuration in PhpStorm.
The bash function below will execute your PHP script, but will enable XDebug’s remote debugging before doing so:
xdebug() {
php -dxdebug.remote_enable=1 -dxdebug.remote_mode=req -dxdebug.remote_port=9000 -dxdebug.remote_host=127.0.0.1 "$@"
}
It assumes the debugger is listening on 127.0.0.1:9000. Simply add this function to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc file
to ensure it’s available in your shell, and then run it:
xdebug path/to/script.php