How to do debugging in php?

Question

My index.php file is compiled correctly when I use one of my PHP executables outside Apache, but fails when I ask Apache to serve it (and fails leaving a blank error log unfortunately). So I'm trying to understand how and where the two PHP compilations start behaving differently.

With my outside-Apache PHP executable, I only need to edit the php.ini file to use xdebug and get first-class debugging. I have no idea how to do the parallel analysis with Apache however. AFAIK, there is no PHP executable inside Apache, just a shared library likeat /libexec/apache2/libphp5.so, and I do not know how to debug that. Does Apache have a php.ini file also? My current system is Mac El Capitan by the way.

Answer 1

You can use eclipse, check the following link to set the eclipse environment.
http://dev.piwik.org/trac/wiki/HowToSetupDevelopmentEnvironmentWindows

Other alternative would be
http://www.xdebug.org/

Answer 2

Programs rarely work correctly the first time. Many things can go wrong in our program that cause the PHP interpreter to generate an error message. we have a choice about where those error messages go. The messages can be sent along with other program output to the web browser. They can also be included in the web server error log.

To make error messages display in the browser, set the display_errors configuration directive to On. To send errors to the web server error log, set log_errors to On. we can set them both to On if where we want error messages in both places.

PHP defines some constants that we use to set the value of error_reporting such that only errors of certain types get reported: E_ALL (for all errors except strict notices), E_PARSE (parse errors), E_ERROR (fatal errors), E_WARNING (warnings), E_NOTICE (notices), and E_STRICT (strict notices).