Xdebug is one of the best debugger and profiler for php (maybe the only good one in open source . The only problem is its lack of dedicated client (there is some work being done for a client but it targets only windows for now), however there is many plugins for many IDE or editors like Eclipse PDT or weaverslave and even for my favourite editor, Vim.

The vim plugin I will use here has been originally written by Seung Woo Shin and modified/improved by Sam Ghods. I find Sam’s version less noisy and seems to work better. As far as I rembember it is also included in Andrei’s vim script (I don’t have it at hand, but check the Andrei’s talk about php and vim, the url should be in there)

Xdebug setup

The first step is to install Xdebug, this procedure is well described in the Xdebug documentation. Check it out here. Don’t forget to enable the extension in your php.ini (the one used by your webserver, fcgi or cli) using

[Bash] zend_extension=/path/to/lib/php/extensions/xdebug.so 

or if you use a debug build of php:

[Bash] zend_extension_debug=/path/to/lib/php/extensions/xdebug.so 

Vim Setup

To run this plugin you will need the python interpreter in Vim, you can verify whether vim has it enabled or not using the following command in Vim:

[Bash] :version 

Be sure to see "+python and +signs" in the list. If you miss them, recompile Vim with "—enable-pythoninterp" or install it using your favourite package manager. For Ubuntu, this command should give you all you need (ubuntu does not install a full vim per default):

[Bash] apt-get install vim-full python2.5 

Fetch the plugin archive here

Extract the archive in your plugin directory, usually ~/.vim/ or /usr/share/vim/addon/. It should look like:

[Bash] /home/johndoe/.vim/plugin/ |-- debugger.py `-- debugger.vim 

Begin a debug session

To tell Xdebug to initialize a debug session, you can pass an extra GET parameter called XDEBUG_SESSION_START:

[Bash] http://testsym.local/frontend_dev.php/home?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1 

The debugger will not start magiclly You have to ask the plugin to wait for Xdebug to send him a signal and the debugging data. Do it by pressing "F5" while being in vim and quickly switch to your browser to reload your page. If vim does nothing but idle after you pressed F5, double check the plugin install, it is not working.

And a little screenshot to show how fantastic are Vim and xDebug:

ps: how to make a pookey happy