macgdbp

In my current Drupal development environment, I run an entire Debian server stack (LAMP + Memcache + Varnish, etc) inside of a VirtualBox virtual machine. On those frustration-laden occasions when I need to fire up the debugger, I use MacGDBp to connect to the virtual machine. Here's how I configure them. (If you just want to configure MacGDBp for debugging with MAMP or OS X's Apache, you may want to read an earlier article, and then check out the updates for Snow Leopard.

As I see it, there are two major drawbacks to the otherwise-spectacular MAMP (MacOS Apache MySQL, PHP) package (three if you count the funky directory structuring):

1. The .h files are all missing, so PECL doesn't work very well.
2. There is no debugger.

The first issue is covered elsewhere. In this article, I will address the second by explaining how to setup XDebug on MAMP. XDebug is one of the two popular PHP debugging engines (With ZendDB being the other).

In this article we will cover the following:

• Getting and installing XDebug
• Using XDebug for basic stack tracing
• Integrating XDebug with TextMate
• Configuring XDebug and MacGDBp for client/server debugging
• Using MacGDBp