Question

I’m struggling with a PHP maintenance script and I was looking for a way to use xdebug solely in command line (like gdb old-school), but I couldn’t figure out how to set a breakpoint, do a step-into, step-over and continue. Xdebug is up and running, as phpinfo(); says.

I found a lot of documentation regarding how to do this using Eclipse and other tools, but none to CLI. Could anyone help me? My environment is Centos 6 and Bash.

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you!

Answer 1

This is actually possible. In the Xdebug source downloads, you will find a directory called “debugclient”. In this directory you will find a very simple client accepting raw DBGP commands, and giving output as XML. To compile, you run:

• apt-get install libedit-dev (or equivalent)
• ./buildconf
• ./configure –with-libedit
• make

You can then run the binary with ./debugclient.

On a different shell, you then run the following:

• export XDEBUG_CONFIG=”idekey=dr”
• php -dxdebug.remote_enable=1 yourscript.php

The debugclient sees this connection, and you then can issue direct DBGP commands. For a breakpoint, you can for example set:

breakpoint_set -i 1 -t line -f file:///path/to/yourscript.php -n 42

the -i 1 is required to be an increasing number, -f is the file and -n the line number. After setting the breakpoint you can then run run -i 2 to advance to that line. For all other commands, I’d refer you to the DBGP documentation at http://xdebug.org/docs-dbgp.php