What do you use to code and debug Drupal?

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Anonymous's picture

I'm testing out TextMate and Xdebug on OS X, similar to Dan Kurtz at Trellon, but I'm still unclear about advantages of one debugger to another, and the benefits of an IDE vs. independent text editors. What development tools do you use? And what do you think is the best PHP debugger?

Comments

TextMate

Michael Hofmockel's picture

I am currently using TextMate and really like it. Having version control commands built into my editor is pretty important.

Regards,
Michael Hofmockel
iMed Studios

Open Source || Open Access || Open Mind

Regards,
Michael Hofmockel

Open Source || Open Access || Open Mind

Not quite what you're asking for...

newz2000's picture

I use mostly VIM and Gedit, but here's a different trick I use. I have virtualbox set up to run a server OS (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server) and use virtualbox's shared folders feature so that it can see my files in my local projects folder. This way I don't have to install Apache and MySQL and PHP locally which I found slow down my computer booting and decrease my battery life when I'm not using them. When I want to test webapps I just boot the VM (takes about 15-20 seconds too boot).

Because it's loading the files off of the same file system as where my editor is it sees the changes instantly. I can configure my VM so that it has the same setup as my live server.

I've not used a PHP debugger much and I'm not sure how well it would work since it would effectively be debugging remotely. However when i have used a debugger I used the one that comes with Netbeans. It's pretty slick.

--
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode

--
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode

Still Looking at 'Em

Summitt Dweller's picture

I'm still looking at debugging possibilities (as well as migration and deployment strategies). Thus far I have found the advice in this article to be helpful: http://www.lullabot.com/articles/quick_and_dirty_debugging. I'm a creature of habit so I'm still developing PHP code using DzSoft PHP Editor...have been using it for about 8 years now. It's a nice editor and I'm really getting some use of it's ability to let me define code "projects" (file collections) with attached comments.

So, for now I'm mostly embedding statements like the one below into my dev copy of the code.

echo '<pre>theme(13)<br>'. print_r(debug_backtrace(), 1) .'</pre>';

This is one I just inserted into theme.inc inside the theme() function. Why would I do something like that? Well, I've got a localhost dev copy of my production site that I'm trying to work with and I think I'm close to getting that right, but now get a WSOD (White Screen Of Death) when I try to open the site. As near as I can tell something is apparently broken in my theme code or settings. When I output the content without using the theme I can see it's pulling all the right info.

Mark

Mark

Follow-Up FYI

Summitt Dweller's picture

Just an FYI... Got my WSOD issue worked out. It apparently wasn't a Drupal problem at all. I believe it was rooted in a mix of PHP versions between my Apache2Triad server PHP and it's MySQL. Correcting the version conflict started looking like a real mess in A2T so I dumped it entirely in favor of WAMP Server 2. No problems since.

Mark

Mark

Hey Cattlecall, we are using

gbernier's picture

Hey Cattlecall, we are using Eclipse for PHP Developers and XDebug and it's been a big help in tracking down issues and strange bugs. We also use the xdebug addon to firefox to get the eclipse debugger to fire off.

Our machines are windows but we work off of Linux Development Servers.

You can check the tutorial to debug drupal here

anil614sagar's picture

Hi check the step by step drupal xdebug installation http://www.anilsagar.com/blog/debug-drupal-using-xdebug-eclipse-and-wamp

Central Iowa Drupal Users Group

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