Xdebug

Xdebug requires a supported version of PHP. For installation it requires the pie tool, unless your Linux distribution has an Xdebug package (most often: php-xdebug ). On most Linux distributions you can install Xdebug through their package manager . You can also install Xdebug on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with the PIE installer through pie install xdebug/xdebug . Most features in Xdebug have to be opted in into. Each feature has a specific opt-in. For example to use the step debugger you need to set xdebug.remote enable=1 in your configuration file. The step debugger requires an IDE (client), of which there are many available . The documentation has instructions for each of Xdebug's features: and a full list of settings is also available there. Before you begin to contribute, please reach out first. Either through email (address at the bottom), an issue in the issue tracker or preferably through IRC on Freenode's xdebug channel. The test framework requires that the PHP binary on the path has Xdebug loaded, with remote debugging enabled through xdebug.mode=debug . It is possible to skip remote debugging tests by exporting the SKIP DBGP TESTS=1 environment variable. The SKIP UNPARALLEL TESTS=1 can be used to skip tests that can not run in parallel environments, and the SKIP SLOW TESTS=1 environment variable to skip slow tests. The OPCACHE environment variable can either be yes or no and controls whether the test framework enables or disables OpCache. Xdebug has extensive documentation on its website . There are over a hundred settings and many functions documented. Please have a look through the wealth of information that Xdebug can provide to make your every day development with PHP easier. For questions regarding Xdebug, please use StackOverflow , and tag your question with xdebug . You can also find ad-hoc and sporadic support on IRC: freenode/ xdebug . You can do that with your favourite client, or by using their webchat .