Understand common debugging tools for PHP

As a PHP developer, writing high-quality code is one of our responsibilities. But everyone has the potential for mistakes and errors, and these need to be addressed. Debugging is a very important aspect of the process, helping us understand problems in our code and fix them. In PHP development, there are many debugging tools available, let’s take a deeper look at these tools and how to use them.

1. Xdebug

Xdebug is probably one of the most popular debugging tools among PHP developers. It provides PHP developers with a very powerful debugging environment. It integrates a large number of features, including stack tracing, variable tracing, coverage analysis, code performance analysis, and more. One of the most powerful features is remote debugging, which can debug code on a virtual machine/remote server.

Using Xdebug needs to be configured in the php.ini file. The following are some sample configurations:

[xdebug] 
zend_extension=/path/to/xdebug.so 
xdebug.remote_enable=1 
xdebug.remote_host=127.0.0.1 
xdebug.remote_port=9000 
xdebug.remote_autostart=1 

2. PHPStorm

PHPStorm is a PHP IDE. It has rich debugging capabilities built into it. It integrates seamlessly with Xdebug and provides many other features such as variable windows, stack traces, watch tables, etc. In addition, it can set breakpoints in the code and pause the program while it is executing, allowing you to inspect the status of the program.

Debugging is very easy with PHPStorm. First, make sure you have configured Xdebug correctly, then connect PHPStorm to your application. You can enable debug mode in PHPStorm's toolbar, and then you can view the running script and use all of the IDE's debugging features.

3. Kint

Kint is a simple but powerful debugging tool that allows developers to quickly and orderly view variables, call stacks and other program information. Its UI is friendly and easy to read and understand. Kint also provides a filter system out of the box to filter out developer-facing variables.

Installation of Kint is very simple, just add it to your composer.json file and run composer update. Using it is also easy, just call the kint() function and pass the variable you want to view.

4. Blackfire

Blackfire is a performance analysis tool that helps you find performance issues in your application. It enables analysis from multiple angles and provides detailed information about performance bottlenecks. Additionally, it can periodically analyze your code and provide alerts on performance issues across your production environment.

Using Blackfire requires installing and starting the agent for your application, and then adding the Blackfire extension in your code. You can then profile the application using the Blackfire Profiler extension in your browser. You can view details such as execution time, function calls, database queries, and more for each request.

5. PHP Debug Bar

PHP Debug Bar is another very popular debugging tool that can provide complete debugging information for your application. It integrates Xdebug and FirePHP support, and also provides support for popular libraries such as Doctrine and PHPUnit. Its UI is very clean and easy to read.

PHP Debug Bar can be installed quickly using Composer and can be easily integrated into various frameworks. Once installed, you just need to add the following lines of code to enable it:

use DebugBarStandardDebugBar; 
$debugbar = new StandardDebugBar(); 
$debugbarRenderer = $debugbar->getJavascriptRenderer(); 
echo $debugbarRenderer->renderHead(); 
echo $debugbarRenderer->render(); 

The above are some commonly used PHP debugging tools. By understanding these tools and their characteristics, you can better understand how to find and fix bugs in your code faster. During the actual development process, you can choose the debugging tool that suits you according to your needs for development and debugging.

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