XAMPP - XDebug Setup for PHP 8

Daniel Opitz

03 Dec 2020

Requirements

• XAMPP for Windows: https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html
• Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015-2019

Setup

• Download Xdebug for the specific PHP version:
  • PHP 8.0 (64-Bit): https://xdebug.org/files/php_xdebug-3.2.0-8.0-vs16-x86_64.dll
  • PHP 8.1 (64-Bit): https://xdebug.org/files/php_xdebug-3.2.0-8.1-vs16-x86_64.dll
  • PHP 8.2 (64-Bit): https://xdebug.org/files/php_xdebug-3.2.0-8.2-vs16-x86_64.dll
• Move the downloaded dll file to: C:\xampp\php\ext
• Rename the dll file to: php_xdebug.dll
• Open the file C:\xampp\php\php.ini with Notepad++
• Disable output buffering: output_buffering = Off
• Scroll down to the [XDebug] section (or create it) and copy/paste these lines:

[XDebug]
zend_extension=xdebug
xdebug.mode=debug
xdebug.start_with_request=trigger

• Restart Apache

PhpStorm

• Enable the Xdebug option: “Can accept external connections” and “Additionally listen on Xdebug 3 default port 9003”. Screenshot
• Use the PhpStorm bookmarklets generator to activate Xdebug from the browser side.

Netbeans

• Change the Netbeans debugging options: Screenshot

Visual Studio Code

• Installing XDebug on anything for VSCode in 5 minutes
• Install the PHP Debug Adapter for Visual Studio Code.
• Debug PHP In VSCode With XDebug

Postman

Add XDEBUG_SESSION_START=PHPSTORM as query parameter to the url, e.g.

• http://localhost?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=PHPSTORM

Starting the debugger from the console

Enter cmd:

set XDEBUG_CONFIG="idekey=xdebug"
php test.php

Known Issues

Can’t locate API module structure ‘php8_module’

Read more: https://community.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=80105#p270731

Xdebug: Step Debug Time-out connecting to debugging client, waited: 200 ms. Tried: localhost:9003 (through xdebug.client_host/xdebug.client_port) :-(

Change xdebug.start_with_request=yes to xdebug.start_with_request=trigger

Warning: XDEBUG_MODE=coverage or xdebug.mode=coverage has to be set

If you change the php.ini setting from xdebug.mode=debug to xdebug.mode=coverage it should work. But then it is not possible to trigger the debugger in the browser for PhpStorm.

Instead, you can run phpunit from the console with this command:

php -d xdebug.mode=coverage -r "require 'vendor/bin/phpunit';" -- --configuration phpunit.xml --do-not-cache-result --coverage-clover build/logs/clover.xml --coverage-html build/coverage

This is how you can use the same command in a composer.json script:

"test:coverage": "php -d xdebug.mode=coverage -r \"require 'vendor/bin/phpunit';\" -- --configuration phpunit.xml --do-not-cache-result --coverage-clover build/logs/clover.xml --coverage-html build/coverage"

The php -d command line option defines the php.ini entry xdebug.mode with value coverage.

Then it starts the phpunit php script and passes the console arguments after the additional -- separator. This works on Linux and on Windows.