For me, it's very helpful to debug code in order to understand the inner workings.
Currently I am using Eclipse PDT and xdebug for my debugging purposes but I am asking myself if there is a better IDE/solution for debugging. Which tools do you guys use?
I've now switched to Netbeans, never liked the 'perspectives' in Eclipse and Netbeans 6.7 is as good as Eclipse for debugging.
There's one last odd problem when debugging, not all contents of variables are displayed but it's quite complex to strip down the problem to the root cause…
Please send me the xdebug-part of your php.ini file (On Unix-Systems this is usually an extra file named xdebug.ini), perhaps I am able to see a configuration problem.
This sounds as if your xdebug settings are not correct, the xdebug running in your webserver-instance calls back the ide when a breakpoint is reached. For this to work correctly xdebug must know on which ip address it can find the ide.
Please Check the following entries in your xdebug.ini or xdebug section of php.ini:
xdebug.remote_enable = 1
xdebug.remote_handler = dbgp
xdebug.remote_host = localhost
xdebug.remote_port = 9000
When ide and your web server are running on the same machine then xdebug.remote_host = localhost is correct. If your webserver runs on another machine the you need to replace 'localhost' with the ip or the dns-resolvable name of your machine. You also need to make sure that port 9000 is opend for incoming tcp connections on your machine that hosts the IDE.
Detailed information for netbeans may be found here:
If you receive an error message saying something like the port 9000 is occupied (or so …) then Follow what MiR suggested. This is surely due to a misconfiguration
if not go to Tools/options/php and activate Stop at First Line if it is not already activated. Or just make a breakpoint in index.php and see what happens.
If you want to simply debug a script written in php choose the first option, if you want to debug a complex yii aplication the second option is your friend.
Please reads the documentation from netbeans.org I proposed a few posts before, this should answer most, if not all of your questions.
Yii declares a lot of variables in it's classes as private, with version 6.5 they are invisible to the debugger, starting with Version 6.7 you can see much more private vars, but still not all.