Question

How do I effectively debug PHP applications? My current method is to use trace output – eg: die(“message”) and then fix the application from there. The problem is that this is often very cumbersome and inefficient. I would like to do something like this:

define('DEBUG', true);

debug({ print_r($arr); });

on_debug_die("application exit");

But I know that PHP doesn’t support that kind of syntax. Can someone help me out?

Answer 1

You can have it like this:

define('DEBUG', "DEBUG"); //Comment this line when you are done debugging

function debug_out($input) {
    if (defined("DEBUG")) {
        print_r($input);
        die;
    }
}

Now, whenever you need debugging, call debug_out('...');.

The better way to do this, of course, is using debugging facilities like XDebug with IDE’s that support it, like PhpStorm.