Adding XDebug to Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV)

Using VVV for WordPress development is awesome, however sometimes the errors returned are confusing and difficult to debug. Thankfully there’s a PHP extension which makes tracing the errors returned by PHP and WordPress much, much easier and that’s XDebug.

Installing XDebug on your VVV machine is easy:

SSH into your VVV machine with:

vagrant ssh

Install XDebug with:

sudo apt-get install php5-xdebug

Open your php.ini

sudo vim /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

Go to the bottom of the file by typing G (capitalized) and enter Insert mode by typing i (lowercase). Paste in the following:

# XDebug Extension
zend_extension="/usr/lib/php5/20121212/xdebug.so"
xdebug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp xdebug.remote_mode=req
xdebug.remote_host=127.0.0.1 xdebug.remote_port=9000

You can also decide whether you want to limit how much information is shown in a var_dump by adding the following settings below the above code:

# Sane limits
xdebug.var_display_max_depth = 5
xdebug.var_display_max_children = 256
xdebug.var_display_max_data = 1024

And if you want no limits on how much information is shown enter the following:

# No limits
xdebug.var_display_max_depth = -1 
xdebug.var_display_max_children = -1
xdebug.var_display_max_data = -1

Exit and save by typing :wq and hit enter.

Restart PHP5-FPM with:

sudo service php5-fpm restart

And you should be good to go! Let me know if you have any problems!