Simplest way do get started debugging PHP (Drupal)

Question

What is the simplest way to get started with debugging and hit a specific line in a Drupal install?

1. Generally?
2. With Eclipse? (how difficult?)
3. On Windows, knowing and having access to Visual Studio (How Difficult with Visual Studio?)

(No Pay: Free or trial)

Locally on Windows I am using the Acquia Drupal WAMP-stack. On the server Ubuntu/Webmin/LAMP.

Answer 1

debugging Drupal is as easy as debugging any PHP application in fact :) there's Visual Studio plugin which adds support for PHP http://www.jcxsoftware.com/ - it is commercial unfortunately.

If you're looking for free solutions working with X-Debug I'd recommend

• tsWebEditor - http://tswebeditor.tigris.org/ - free, unsupported, dead for a long time but still handles XDebug pretty well
• notepad++ with XDebug plugin - http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
• Dev-PHP states on the website that it handles XDebug, however I was unable to get it working

well hopefully you won't be mad with mebut I'll recommend also my own IDE as well

• HateML 2 - http://hateml.com/ - not 100% ready yet, but working with projects & debugger is pretty complete. What's important, I've updated it to work with latest XDebug release which broken support for "watches" feature in some old IDEs.

There are also Java-based IDEs (like mentioned Eclipse, or Aptana, NetBeans etc) however I have no experience with them as they consume way too much memory as for me

Answer 2

There's a few tutorials out there on how to setup Eclipse together with Xdebug. It's a great combo that I use myself.

Sometimes for light-weight debugging, I have found the FirePHP plugin to firefox to come really handy.

Answer 3

If you're looking for free/os options I would recommend using Eclipse PDT with XDebug.

A good place to start is http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/articles/debugger/os-php-eclipse-pdt-debug-pdf.pdf