xdebug

XDebug is a great PHP debugging tool, but it also comes with a very useful profiler that can tell you all sorts of information about your PHP application. This includes things like memory footprint and CPU load but will also have detailed information about the entire callstack of the code that was run. To enable the profiler part of XDebug you just need to set up a few rules in your xdebug.ini file.

I have started to use virtual machines to develop sites rather than installing a local web server. This allows me to replicate the exact setup of the server I will be deploying to with ease. For each virtual machine I set up a shared folder which allows me to store the files locally whilst being able to run the code on the virtual machine. One thing I missed was the ability to use xdebug to debug the sites through Netbeans, so I set about trying to set up the virtual hosts to allow me to use xdebug remotely.

All that is needed was to add a xdebug.remote_connect_back clause to the xdebug.ini file found in the PHP configuration. Set this value to 1 to automatically connect back to any xdebug session that is created on the server.