Netbeans + Xdebug + php not working

Question

My netbeans does not work the breakpoints using xdebug, my configuration looks correct, so I configured the first time I ran up to stop debugging the first time since then h

Answer 1

Here's how I was able to get it to work w/ mulitple PHP-FPM homebrew installations.

I used this excellent article for the multiple installations:

https://echo.co/blog/os-x-1010-yosemite-local-development-environment-apache-php-and-mysql-homebrew

In the comments of that post you'll see recommended how to install xdebug, bottom line:

brew install php56-xdebug

You have to install xdebug for each verions of PHP you have installed. Homebrew will make a xdebug.ini file for each version of php you installed. Each will have a path like:

/usr/local/etc/php//conf.d/ext-xdebug.ini

This article installs DNSMasq which runs on xdebug's default port (9000), so you'll need to change the xdebug port to something else (9001 works fine.)

Edit the above mentioned ext-xdebug.ini file (or files if you installed more than one version of php.) Here's what works for me:

[xdebug]
zend_extension="/usr/local/opt/php56-xdebug/xdebug.so"

; General config
; Dumps local variables on exception
xdebug.show_local_vars=On
; Dump server variables
xdebug.dump.SERVER=*
; Dump global variables
xdebug.dump_globals=On
xdebug.collect_params=4;

; Tracing
;xdebug.auto_trace=On
;xdebug.trace_output_dir= /opt/local/php_traces/
xdebug.show_mem_delta=On
xdebug.collect_return=On


; Debugging. You might need to specify your host with some additional options
xdebug.remote_enable=1
: from http://devzone.zend.com/1147/debugging-php-applications-with-xdebug/
xdebug.remote_host="localhost"
xdebug.remote_port=9001
xdebug.remote_handler="dbgp"

The first two lines are all that is in the original homebrew file.

BTW - when I installed multiple PHP versions, this ext-xdebug.ini file was only created for the first PHP version I installed. I simply copied this file to the other PHP version locations, and changed the "php56-xdebug" part of the path in line 2 to reflect the proper php version.

Notice "xdebug.remote_port=9001"

Then in Netbeans (I'm using 8.02 Mac osX10.10.3) I use the following settings. Go to Preferences->PHP->Debugging

Debugger Port: 9001

Stop at First Line: (unchecked)

Watches & Balloon Evaluation: (checked - there's a warning but it works fine for me.)

Also worth noticing is that in order for xdebug to show up using phpinfo() (or command line php -i) I need to restart apache with:

launchctl unload -Fw ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.php56.plist

sudo apachectl restart

launchctl load -Fw ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.php56.plist

For some reason my setup requires me to run this every time I startup. Kind of a pain, but I incorporated it in a shell command to easily switch between versions.

One more hint: part of brew info php56 says:

OS X 10.8 and newer come with php-fpm pre-installed, to ensure you are using
the brew version you need to make sure /usr/local/sbin is before /usr/sbin
in your PATH:

  PATH="/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"

Until I added this to my .profile_bash file, changes I made to each version's php-fpm.conf file were not recognized. Everything else seemed to work so it was confusing.

Hope this saves someone else time & trouble.