What We'll Learn About Debugging

In this course we’ll learn that we can ditch var_dump() and dd() and move to a more pow­er­ful, faster, and eas­i­er way to debug prob­lems in our code. the fun­da­men­tals of work­ing with Xde­bug in mul­ti­ple local­host­ing envi­ro­ments and in the two most pop­u­lar IDEs for PHP pro­gram­ming: Php­Storm and VSCode.

The goal of the course is to get you dump var_dump() and dd(). You think I’m kid­ding but, real­ly, that’s my goal. If you saw me out on the streets of Paris in sum­mer of 2022 and I asked you what you used to work through that tough bug in your fan­cy new plu­g­in, you’d yell from the top of the Eifel Tow­er: RYAN, I USED XDE­BUG! And then I’d give two thumbs up in your gen­er­al direction.

The bor­ing ver­sion of this goal is that I want you to become com­fo­rat­ble set­ting up, con­fig­ur­ing, and using Xde­bug in dif­fer­enet types of devel­op­ment envi­ron­ments, as well as becom­ing famim­liar dif­fer­ent debug­ging strate­gies and techniques.

While our work in this course will focus on projects run­ning Craft CMS, there’s no rea­son you couldn’t take what you’ve learned here and apply to oth­er frame­works, CMSs­es, and projects. Like every­thing I teach, I’m try­ing to help you learn a frame­work for a tool, so you can take that frame­work and apply it else­where. It’s like recy­cling your soda cans except for knowledge.

• What Xde­bug is and how it works. 
  • The set­up of Xde­bug will make more sense once we under­stand how Xde­bug works and where it sits in the toolchain.
• How to set up Xde­bug in Php­Storm and VSCpde
• How to set up Xde­bug in pop­u­lar local­host­ing tools, like DDEV, Craft Ntiro, Lan­do, and MAMP.
• We’ll install a cus­tom plu­g­in from the Craft Plu­g­in Store that will allow us to debug the same code at the same time and manip­u­late val­ues to test for dif­fer­ent outcomes.
• We will learn how to set break­points in a debug­ging session
• We will learn how to manip­u­late vari­ables dur­ing a debug­ging session
• We will learn how to watch dif­fer­ent expres­sions in order to observe their behav­ior dur­ing the appli­ca­tion life­cy­cle in a debug­ging session
• We will learn how to access data from the debug­ging con­sole, includ­ing how to set and get vari­ables, or even call methods
• We will learn about step debug­ging and how we can step into, over, out of, etc. expres­sions to ful­ly exam­ine what our code is doing dur­ing the appli­ca­tion lifecycle.
• We will learn how to use Xde­bug for our Twig tem­plates in PhpStorm

I’m try­ing to cov­er as many local­host­ing setups as fea­si­ble that eas­i­ly sup­port Xde­bug out-of-the-box. If you are using some­thing that doesn’t sup­port Xde­bug, then you should con­sid­er choos­ing a tool that does. There are so many good local­host­ing tools now that there’s not a good rea­son to use some­thing that isn’t mod­ern, robust, and sup­ports the best prac­tices for local development. 

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s move on the next video and talk about what Xde­bug is. What is this thing anyway?