Derick Rethans

Derick Rethans

Getting the most out of Xdebug

Derick Rethans is a PHP internals expert, author of Xdebug and an OpenStreetMap and mapping enthusiast.

He has contributed in a number of ways to the PHP project, including the Xdebug debugging tool, and various extensions and additions. He’s a frequent lecturer at conferences, the author of php|architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming, and the co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming. He is now working on the PHP driver for MongoDB.

Getting the most out of Xdebug

This session teaches you how to detect and debug PHP scripts with the free open source tool Xdebug, which is an extension to PHP. The first part will quickly show how to get started with Xdebug. The second part of the session will cover detecting problems in your scripts by showing how Xdebug provides debugging aides in the form of stack/function traces, dumps of variables, modified PHP functions. In the last part I will show the remote debugger capabilities of Xdebug with different IDEs, where you can: set breakpoints on functions, methods and file/line combinations and evaluating error messages. On top of this you will also see how you can use Xdebug’s profiler to find bottlenecks in your applications. I will be focussing on the least known
features of Xdebug.