Re: [tlug] Recommendations for PHP debuggers?

[<stephen@example.com>]

Dave M G writes:

 > Of course, fate being what it is, it is now inevitable that I will post 
 > something that actually is OT, but not mark it as such. I have 
 > officially been jinxed.

Of course.  You'll be embarrassed, nobody else will notice.  ;-)

 > And I guess I did find some instructions:
 > http://support.nusphere.com/viewtopic.php?t=576
 > 
 > But they are far from clear.

To you, sure.  That's not a problem, you'll get into it as you go
along.  (Except that it will take up some of your time to get into it.
In this case, I recommend investing the time rather than looking for a
plug'n'play solution for the reasons I already gave: Eclipse is a
GoodThang[tm], and this seems to be the "canonical" debug module
advertising the capabilities you want.  FWIW, of course the final
decision is yours.)

There are some ambiguities, but note that in PREPARE #4 it says to
make sure that extension_dir is set correctly in php.ini.  So
extension_dir is surely a configuration variable of PHP, and after
that he uses it as a metavariable to refer to that directory specified
in php.ini.

"phped/debugger/server" is a relative reference since it doesn't look
like an URL and doesn't start with "/".  The trick here is "relative
to WHAT?!!!?!"  My guess is that it is relative to the top of the tree
of the DBG product, which you haven't downloaded yet, right?

 > It appears to my easily shaken newbie eyes that I have nothing like what 
 > they are talking about. What's up with that?

Well, "relative" is relative to "where you put it, boss!"

So, since you didn't, you don't, yet.  A typical reasonable procedure
might be something like

# you probably need to sudo to access these locations
mkdir -p /usr/local/src/downloads
cd /usr/local/src/downloads
# I used Firefox to scarf these links from http://dd.cron.ru/dbg/downloads.php
# You could also just download with the browser
wget http://dd.cron.ru/dbg/download.php?h=213.1-mod-php-L
wget http://dd.cron.ru/dbg/download.php?h=213.1-cli-L
cd ..
for i in downloads/*; do tar xzf $i; done

and now you should be able to find them where the directions say they
should be.  (I can't guarantee that, of course, but it's a pretty good
bet.)

(If you already *have* stuff in /usr/local/src/downloads, the wildcard
above is probably a bit risque, but since the downloads are done by
fairly arbitrary queries I'm not going to try to guess what the actual
file names will be.)



Steve