What is Xdebug?

Xde­bug is, at its core, step debug­ger that has tight inte­gra­tion with IDEs to make it real­ly sim­ple to set break­points in PHP code to gain insight into what your code is doing dur­ing runtime. 

Xde­bug is a PHP exten­sion and has to be installed and com­piled with PHP. For­tu­nate­ly, a lot of local devel­op­ment tools make it sim­ple to install and run Xdebug. 

Step debug­ging isn’t the only thing that Xde­bug lets you do. Here are fea­tures of Xdebug:

• Step debug­ging: set break­points where the code exe­cu­tion stops so you can selec­tive­ly step through the code and eval­u­ate what is hap­pen­ing dur­ing the appli­ca­tion runtime.
• Bet­ter error report­ing when Xde­bug is enabled and the appli­ca­tion is running. 
• Trac­ing
• Pro­fil­ing
• Code Cov­er­age analysis

We’re going to focus on this course on the step debug­ging part of Xde­bug since it’s the most imme­di­ate­ly valu­able to the most peo­ple. And, I know you’ll get a lot out of it that you can apply to your work today.

What Xde­bug is isn’t that com­pli­cat­ed. But mak­ing sure we know how it works, at least at a high lev­el, is impor­tant so we under­stand the tool as we use it. It also makes it eas­i­er to under­stand the set­up process if we know how Xde­bug works.