Question

I recently installed xdebug on my ststem and wanted to increase xdebug.var_display_max_depth from 3 to 10. How can I go about doing that?

Answer 1

There are two ways to do that. You can edit this value locally and globally too.

1. Local setting (“Local value“) in your own PHP file:

   <?php  
       ini_set('xdebug.var_display_max_depth', '10');    
       // here comes your code...  
   ?>
   

2. Global setting (“Master value“) in php.ini:

   1. First locate your php.ini file.
      
      • In phpinfo(), you can get to know where it is from “Loaded Configuration File” directive.
      • You can also locate it using command prompt/terminal:
        • Windows: php --ini | findstr /C:"Loaded Configuration File"
        • Linux/UNIX-like: php --ini | grep 'Loaded Configuration File'
      • using php_ini_loaded_file(): <?php echo php_ini_loaded_file(); ?>

3. Open your php.ini in a text editor file.

4. You have to put something like the following to this file (in this example, I’m using php_xdebug-2.2.3-5.3-vc9-nts.dll _{(use http://xdebug.org/wizard.php to get to know which version you need)}), and of course, you need to substitute <path to your XDebug> to the appropriate path:

   [Xdebug]  
   ;; <path to your XDebug> is like
   ;; C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.3\ext in Windows
   ;; (should be e.g. in PHP directory's "ext" subdir)
   ;; [backslash UNDER WINDOWS, / under UNIX-like operating systems]  
   zend_extension = "<path to your XDebug>\php_xdebug-2.2.3-5.3-vc9-nts.dll"  
   
   ;; HERE comes the answer to your question, we set the mentioned variable to 10  
   xdebug.var_display_max_depth = 10
   

---

Simple as that… you can check the results in phpinfo’s xdebug part in a table: there will be a “Local value” and a “Master value” column.

Here’s a sample screenshot from my localhost server; in this example, the global configuration is 3, but I set the local value to 10, with the above mentioned ini_set():