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PHP 7.4.4 (from official PHP Dockerfile).That is to say: what is this thing I’m doing and why does it work?īearing that in mind, here is how I implemented the stack, step by step with a little bit more info than just your average set of instructions. One of the things that most articles I’d read or tried to follow miss out one core thing that frustrated me: most have the “how”, but not the “why”. So, I thought: why not give it a go again? And so I did, going step by step though Gary and Derick’s video, with the goal to implement it into our development process for our Open Source project Awe-der. These thoughts of mine were also circulated in others’ replies to the tweet, but it was when Tighten’s Matt Stauffer and Twilio’s Gary Hockin stepped in to offer livestreams with Derick to set it up that I took notice – the resulting content is now excellently documented at with others’ contributions. Lastly, but most importantly for developers: why bother when you can use var_dump() or Symfony’s dump() or Laravel’s dd()? Given that when used as part of Laravel’s tinker it boots up the whole app into a REPL environment, does that render something like Xdebug somewhat redundant? I’ve previously written an article on how superb PsySh is as an application’s command line. It was a pain trying to set it up manually before, but what about now, where Xdebug runs a server on an IP, but it will be running in Docker? A lot has changed since I started – I use Jetbrains PHPStorm as my IDE, and develop with Docker. Plus, things like custom “bookmark” browser extensions made it feel like you had to jump through a lot of hoops to use it effectively. I’d tried Xdebug before at some point – I can’t recall when, and had an experience that left me thinking that understanding what you could do with it would take far too much time up for me to learn. It’s not like it was some obscure or new tool being talked about. It’s been around years – I started writing PHP professionally in 2016, by which time Xdebug had existed for 14 years. Like many PHP developers with significant experience: I know of Xdebug. Let’s clear up some existing thoughts I had on Xdebug – some readers might nod in agreement or have/had similar experiences: I thought, ‘Do I need to revisit Xdebug?’, and I realised that I’d fallen into Derick’s trap.
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Quite the controversial “hot-take” from Derick, and while it certainly caused quite the stir (that it was probably designed to), it made me think. It all started out with that oh-so-modern cause of a community backlash: the humble tweet.
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**This article was written for my employer Jump24, you can read the original source article here.
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