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Zend & Command Line Debugging

I was just asked how to debug PHP, using Zend Studio, but for a CLI PHP script, as opposed to a normal web-based PHP script. (Web based debugging is easy – fire up Zend Studio, load up Firefox with the Zend Toolbar installed, and hit "Debug".)

To be honest, debugging your CLI PHP scripts is almost as easy! All you need to do is launch your PHP script from a simple bash script, that does a little bit of simple magic for you:

#!/bin/sh
export QUERY_STRING="start_debug=1&debug_port=10000&debug_host=IP&debug_stop=1"
/path/to/php -q /path/to/script.php

Just replace IP with your IP address (be it 127.0.0.1, or whatever), launch Zend, and start debugging. Easy!

UPDATE: Zend have similar info on their site these days…

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 15:22 and is filed under PHP Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Zend & Command Line Debugging”

  1. Chris Nutting says:
    17 February 2006 at 15:49

    Taking this one step further, I created a bash script “debug”, placed it in $PATH, and put the following in it:

    #!/bin/sh

    export QUERY_STRING=”start_debug=1&debug_port=10000&debug_host=127.0.0.1&debug_stop=1″
    /usr/bin/php -q $@

    Now I can just do “debug script.php variable1 variable2 variable3 …” :)

  2. Rob Hunter says:
    14 March 2006 at 12:48

    Just for completeness, I thought I’d mention that it’s normally a good idea to surround $@ with double-quotes, to pass parameters with spaces in them.