If you, like me, use a development machine provided by the company It department, it will probably be Windows based due security policies enforcement or something on these lines. That's ok, many of the new Windows based machines are really good and sturdy, and now, with the Windows Subsystem for Linux it can even work better for development that is not related to C#, .Net or related technologies.
However, when working with PHP and Laravel, we already have a nice way to run our code, inside the Vagrant VM from Laravel itself, Homestead. It comes with a bunch of software preinstalled that a Laravel application (and developer) may need at anytime during its/her life and, for the most part, it works out of the box.
When I say for the most part, I mean the main subject of this post: debugging. For some strange reason, when running Homestead under Windows, it simply does not work out of the box. It's not a matter of turning Xdebug on (the default debbuging extension bundled, which comes disabled), restart the server (which the shell aliases/functions already present on the VM do for us) and we are ready to debug the app. Unfortunatelly, it's a little bit more complicated.
Luck you, I walked this lonely road (if you got the reference, high five for you) brought all the steps necessary to make it work like a charm.
So, just to be 100% on the safe side, I'll assume you already have a Homestead installation working on your machine and you need/want to make debuggin work. If not, head to the Laravel Homestead Documentation and come back when you're finished.
Without further ado, here is the guide.
When adding a new site to your Laravel Homestead installation, don't forget to add the following
port forwarding to your Homestead.yaml:
ports:
- send: 9000
to: 9001send: 9000 is the port from your Host Operating System (be it Windows, Mac or Linux machine)
and to: 9001 is the port from your guest Operating System (the virtual machine you want to
connect to). We set the guest Xdebug port to 9001 due to PHP running on Laravel Homestead
in the port 9000 which would cause a conflict and not allow Xdebug to proper receive
and/or return data of the debugging session.
Proceed with the start up of the VM. Once logged in (perhaps, after homestead ssh if you have
followed the tips/tricks from Laravel Homestead Documentation), run route -nee. You will
see an output much like:
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface MSS Window irtt
0.0.0.0 10.0.2.2 0.0.0.0 UG 100 0 0 eth0 0 0 0
10.0.2.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 0 0 0
10.0.2.2 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 100 0 0 eth0 0 0 0
192.168.10.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1 0 0 0The first line, with the destination 0.0.0.0 is the host system. We need to use the if
gateway value as the remote_host configuration of Xdebug. This way, if you edit the
file /etc/php/VERSION/fpm/conf.d/20-xdebug.ini, switching VERSION by the PHP version
you're using in your applications, you should have something like this:
zend_extension=xdebug.so
xdebug.remote_enable = 1
xdebug.remote_host = 10.0.2.2
xdebug.remote_port = 9000
xdebug.max_nesting_level = 1000
xdebug.remote_log = /home/vagrant/var/log/xdebug.logPay attention that we dont have xdebug.remote_connect_back turned on as this will transform
our host gateway address into something like 192.168.10.1 and listen the port 9000. As
Xdebug receives data on port 9001 it can safely send data to the port 9000 that will,
in turn, forward data to the port 9000 of the host operating system that will have
PHPStorm listening to be able to pause on our breaks on the code.
Now, the PHPStorm configuration. Go to File > Settings > Languages & Frameworks > PHP > Debug
and ensure that Xdebug > Debug port is set to 9000 as well.
After all this done, we can start debbuging our application by setting breaking points through IDE, by clicking by the side of the line numbers of the code. When a breakpoint is set, a red circle will appear. And after setting the breakpoints we can press the button Start Listening for PHP Debug Connections which will cause PHPStorm to listen to connections from Xdebug from Laravel Homestead.
After hours and hours of researching this was the solution to my problem. Thank you very much!