Xdebug

Skpr provides developer images for local PHP environments.

These images come with Xdebug installed for debugging exercises.

This document covers the ways which develop teams can use Xdebug when debugging their application.

Getting Setup

Xdebug can be triggered either by a cookie (web request) or environment variable (command line).

Below is a list of resources for setting up an extension for your browser / IDE combination.

Browser Extensions

• Google Chrome
• Firefox
• Edge

IDE

• PHPStorm
• CODE

Profiling

Xdebug has a list of modes in which it can operate, one of those is profile mode which allows for developers to determine performance-related bottlenecks.

Developers are able to configure their local development environments for profile mode by setting the following environment variables:

XDEBUG_MODE=profile

To access these profiles developers can setup a mount for temporary files using the following configuration:

volumes:
  # Adds a hidden xdebug directory for temporary files.
  - ./.xdebug:/tmp/xdebug

Visualising Profile Files

Xdebug dumps profile files in the cachegrind format.

Below is a list of tools that can be used to visualise these files:

• PHPStorm
• KCachegrind