While PHP-developing it sometimes is just too tedious to do those ‘add a echo here and there, then reload and search the echoed strings on the screen’-loops. So I searched for a debugger for my favourite editor emacs. After a lengthy install procedure I finally got it running: With geben on emacs you can debug PHP (step through and evaluate expressions)

geben in action

Installation

Install xdebug php5-module

get xdebug for php (See “xdebug für ubuntu (german)”)

sudo pecl install xdebug

→ File lies at /usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/xdebug.so

edit php.ini (see “easy php debugging using debug and vim”)

Put these under “Module Settings”:

  zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/xdebug.so
  [debug]
  ; Remote settings. Adapt if you're not running apache on localhost
  xdebug.remote_autostart=off
  xdebug.remote_enable=on
  xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
  xdebug.remote_mode=req
  xdebug.remote_host=localhost
  xdebug.remote_port=9000

Restart apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Install required packages

Unfortunately, geben doesn’t work with the ubuntu “gutsy gibbon” packages. So do not do apt-get eieio. Instead: download cedet and eieio from cedet.sourceforge.net and copy both into ~/elisp/

cd ~/elisp/
tar -xzvf *.tar.gz
cd cedet*
make
cd ../eieio*
make

add this to .emacs:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/elisp/eieio-0.17")
(load-file "~/elisp/cedet-1.0pre4/common/cedet.el")

get debugclient from http://xdebug.org/ (currently: this file)
rename it to debugclient and move to /usr/local/bin/

install geben

download geben from http://trac.sakura.ne.jp/geben/
unpack it into ~/elisp/

add this to your .emacs-file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/home/phred/elisp/geben")
(add-to-list 'load-path "/home/phred/elisp/geben/gud")

Usage

Restart emacs. Type alt-x geben. Load the script you want to debug in firefox with ?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1 appended

Voilà, that’s it. After pressing space to ‘activate’ geben you can use this keys:

spc step into/step over
i   step into
o   step over
r   step out
b   set a breakpoint at a line
u   unset a breakpoint at a line
g   run
e   eval expression (to inspect variables: best is probably print_r($this, true))
q   stop debugger

Update: After some usage it bugged me to always type print_r($var, true) to inspect a variable. And then, the print_r-output is cut after 1024 chars. Knowing absolutely nothing about lisp I did some very lame changes to the geben code.

With these changes I’m able to type ‘E’ and then write $variable and geben writes all the output to the message-buffer. Download the diff and patch the geben-sourcecode with

patch -i geben.diff