Tutorial: XDebug for developing, debugging and profiling PHP

XDebug is one of the essential PHP extensions for PHP developers. The name is a bit misleading, as it implies that it is just a debugging tool. This can put people off, since getting the debugger to work with your personal editor requires an understanding of networking, and can often be confusing. Even if you can't immediately get XDebug to work as a debugger, it is still valuable as a stack trace tool, or as a color coded replacement for PHP's var_dump, or as a code coverage analysis tool, and most importantly as a profiler. In this tutorial I'll attempt to cover installation, and most of XDebug's standard features.

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