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Debugging PHP on Windows with XDebug and VIM

May 21, 2008 9:45:am 7 Comments , , and

Habari is a sufficiently complex PHP application that sometimes the only way to figure out what is going on is to fire up a debugger. Following a suggestion on #habari and some google searching, I found an article on the Box.net blog on using XDebug with vim. The instructions were for a linux box, and I initially struggled to get things working on Windows (XAMPP). But, I finally got it through digging through the comments on the Box.net article and Vim documentation. I thought it would be useful to gather the required steps in one place, so here are my instructions:

  • Read the Box.net article.
  • Download XDebug and put it in xampplite\php\ext
  • Edit xampplite\apache\bin\php.ini. Add these lines:
    zend_extension_ts="c:/xampplite/php/ext/php_xdebug-2.0.3-5.2.5.dll"
    xdebug.remote_enable = 1
    xdebug.remote_port = 9000
    xdebug.remote_host = localhost
  • Restart Apache. Check that xdebug appears on your phpinfo() page.
  • Download the xdebug plugin for Vim and put it in: C:\Program Files\Vim\vim71\plugin
  • Download and install Python 2.4 (not 2.5). You can see which version of Python your copy of gVim is looking for by looking for the ‘python’ string in the gVim binary (dirty, but it works!)
  • Now you need to modify debugger.py to work with windows paths, so open debugger.py in gVim
    • Change the session file to something reasonable. XAMPP has a directory that already serves this purpose, so you might change self.sessfile to
      self.sessfile = "C:\\xampplite\\tmp\\debugger_vim_saved_session." + str(os.getpid())
    • Now change every occurance of getAttribute['filename'][7:] to getAttribute['filename'][8:]. Do the same with getAttribute['fileuri'][7:]
  • Open up a browser and append ?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1 to the end of an address on your local webserver.
  • Open gVim. Hit F5, then refresh your browser page. You should now be debugging!

7 Responses to Debugging PHP on Windows with XDebug and VIM

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  1. 777 David Damstra July 15, 2008 3:45:pm

    Hey Blake, thanks for the tips. I am so close to getting this working. Hope you can help…

    Developing on WinXP with GVIM connected via sftpdrive to the remote Ubuntu box with the website on it.

    Set up php.ini for remote debugging on my local WinXP IP.

    I edit the file in vim, hit F5, refresh the page in firefox. It connects, but I get the following error in gVim:

    E185: Invalid buffer name: var/www/{siteName}}/htdocs/filename.php

    Seems to me that its trying to map the same directory structure on my locally mapped drive (via sftp) to the one on the webserver and they don’t match.

    Any ideas? Any help appreciated. Thanks.

  2. 803 Blake Johnson July 16, 2008 9:25:am

    Hi David,

    It sounds like you need to modify the paths that debugger.py is trying to open. I actually don’t do any python programming myself, so I can’t give you specifics, but I would imagine that you want to write a function which takes in a linux path and maps it to your sftpdrive path.

    In PHP your function would look like

    function remap( $path ) { return ‘F:' + preg_replace( ‘%/%’, ‘\’, $path ); }

    where “F:” is the drive letter of your sftpdrive. Then you want to wrap every reference to getAttribute[‘filename’][7:]. You just need to convert my function to Python.

  3. 804 Blake Johnson July 16, 2008 9:34:am

    If I am not mistaken, in Python my function would be:

    def remap (path): return ‘F:\’ + path.replace(‘/’, ‘\’)

  4. 814 David Damstra July 17, 2008 9:43:am

    Thanks Blake,

    It’s more complex than that, since the full paths are not even close.

    I gave up on it.

    Thanks for your efforts though.

  5. 2522 cyberhobo February 19, 2009 7:28:pm

    Thanks, I wouldn’t have gotten very far without this!

    Apache was dying on me until I made this edit on line 675 in my php.ini:

    extension=php_xdebug-2.0.4-5.2.8.dll

    Then I kept getting an error with the sessfile edit in debugger.py. In the end I added “import tempfile” at the top and changed it to:

    self.sessfile = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile().name;

    Now I can start the debugger, but I always seem to get a socket timeout error before I can do anything in it. Probably an apache configuration issue…

  6. 2551 Kim Hermansson March 10, 2009 9:42:am

    I had a small problem where debugger.py tried to open files with spaces in their pathnames. Xdebug sent the filenames with space as ‘%20’.

    To fix it i changed all occurences of getAttribute[‘filename’][7:] to getAttribute[‘filename’][7:].replace(‘%20’, ’ ‘) and getAttribute[‘fileuri’][7:] to getAttribute[‘fileuri’][7:].replace(‘%20’, ’ ‘)

    Im sure there are some elite python command to strip html entities but that atleast fixed it for me.

  7. 2564 Blake Johnson March 13, 2009 12:07:am

    Thanks for the tip, Kim.

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