xdebug

ciao folks,

i'm currently setting up a development environment whose primary use is intended for testing and debugging a 'beta' of the live site that i run.

so far i have set up the following:

a virtual machine with
* LAMP-stack on an Ubuntu-OS
* XDebug-extension to Apache
* a Drupal installation that matches my live setup

Eclipse as IDE on my workstation with
* PDT (PHP Development Tools)
* RSE (Remote System Explorer)

Here's a prebuilt virtualbox environment for development. Works on any platform. I think this is a great way to introduce people to developing Drupal with FOSS tools. if nothing else it provides a debugging environment plug-and-play.

What is it?

its a Virtualbox VDI image (which has a smaller footprint than VMware) using Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.

The the image of course (like VMware) works on any platform, Windows, Mac, *nix. I think anything with a JAVA JRE stack.

The setup includes:

• LAMP - using xampp - for a cleaner / easier interface for noobs, and includes phpmyadmin

I just posted a quick blog on some hacky ways to enable JIT debugging with Xdebug:

http://www.openkomodo.com/blog/jeffg/jit-php-debugging-komodo

My example is Komodo IDE, but this should be usable for any Xdebug client app. It should be simple enough to enable JIT debugging in a Drupal instance by adding this line to your custom module:

ini_set('xdebug.remote_mode', 'jit');

You should keep in mind that if xdebug.remote_mode is set to JIT, you can't debug in the normal way.