Walkthrough for installing xdebug for php 7 on linux and enabling its support for phpstorm.

xdebug_installation_on_linux.md

Xdebug Installation

Please follow the following steps to configure Xdebug on Linux.

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Tested on

• Linux mint 17.1 Rebecca

• PHP 7.0 (Installed using PPA by Ondrej)

• LAMP installed using Tasksel

• PHPStorm 2016.2

Pre Requisites

This installation assumes you have following installed.

• Apache2

• PHP 7.0

• PHPStorm (If Xdebug support is required, else not necessary)

Steps

• Open terminal and write following command

php -i > /var/www/html/php_info.txt

• Copy the output from /var/www/html/php_info.txt

• Go to Xdebug.org , and paste the output inside the text box on the page. It will analyze the output and will recommend the most suited package of Xdebug.

• Download it.

• Go to the folder where you downloaded the tar file and run the following command there.

  tar -xvzf XDEBUG_FILE_YOU_DOWNLOADED.tgz

• Now go inside the directory where tar extracted the contents of XDEBUG_FILE_YOU_DOWNLOADED.tgz file.

• Before doing anything else run

  sudo apt-get install php7.0-dev

  if you already have the php dev package installed skip this point.

• Run following sequence of commands to build the Xdebug extension from its source.

  phpize

  ./configure

  make

• Up until this point if you get no errors, you will have a folder named modules in your current directory.

• Run following command to place the freshly created Xdebug extension inside the php folder.

  sudo cp modules/xdebug.so /usr/lib/php/20151012/

• Now go to /etc/php/7.0/mods-available, and create following file.

  sudo touch xdebug.ini

• Open the xdebug.ini file in your favorite editor, and add following lines to it.

  zend_extension=/usr/lib/php/20151012/xdebug.so
  xdebug.remote_enable=1
  xdebug.remote_port=9000
  xdebug.profiler_enable=1
  xdebug.profiler_output_dir=PATH_TO_PROFILER_OUTPUT_DIR
  xdebug.remote_log=PATH_TO_LOG/xdebug.log
  xdebug.remote_autostart=1
  xdebug.idekey=SOME_IDE_KEY
  xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
  xdebug.remote_mode=req
  

  change the PATH_TO_PROFILER_OUTPUT_DIR to point to the directory you want to receive profiler output. Change PATH_TO_LOG to point to the directory where you want to receive xdebug.log. Change SOME_IDE_KEY to some unique random string, I haven't found any issues for it being specific to something.

• Create symlink to the xdebug.ini using following command.

  sudo ln -s /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/xdebug.ini /etc/php/7.0/cli/conf.d/20-xdebug.ini

• Now run the following commands.

  sudo phpenmod xdebug

  sudo service apache2 restart

At this point you will have Xdebug installed and configured to use, you can use

php -v

to check if xdebug is installed or not.

Configuring Xdebug for PHPStorm

• Open your project in PHPStorm

• Go to File > Settings > Languages & Frameworks > PHP.

• Select Language level to PHP 7 and choose interpreter to PHP 7 as well.

• Click on the menu icon next to Choose interpreter option and set PHP executable path to /usr/bin/php and Debugger extension to /usr/lib/php/20151012/xdebug.so

• Click Ok to apply the changes.

• Now to check if PHPStorm is able to access Xdebug, click on Run > Start Listening for PHP Debug Connections option at the end, Then open Run > Webserver Debug Validation panel. Click on validate and it should show you the currently loaded xdebug extension version inside information pane.

• Now set breakpoint inside the app and then start run the app in debug mode and phpstorm should pause the execution at the set breakpoint.