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Using Xdebug with Herd

Herd includes support for Xdebug, a popular and powerful debugger for PHP. The free version of Herd ships with Xdebug’s PHP extensions out-of-the-box, but you need to manually enable the extension when you need it.

If Xdebug is too much for you and you prefer debugging via dumps, check out the Dumps of Herd Pro.

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Enabling Xdebug manually

In order to activate Xdebug, you need to add the appropriate PHP extension to your php.ini file. The extensions are located in the Herd application bundle, which you can find in your application folder. The application bundle is at:

C:\Program Files\Herd\resources\app.asar.unpacked\resources\bin\xdebug

After locating the correct version of Xdebug, you can append the necessary configuration to your php.ini file. For example, the php.ini for PHP 8.3 is at:

"%USERPROFILE%\.config\herd\bin\php83\php.ini"

You can add the Xdebug configuration to this file by adding these lines:

zend_extension=C:\Program Files\Herd\resources\app.asar.unpacked\resources\bin\xdebug\xdebug-8.3.dll
xdebug.mode=debug,develop
xdebug.start_with_request=yes
xdebug.start_upon_error=yes

After saving the changes to your php.ini file, you need to restart Herd’s services from the menu bar icon, or by running the following command in your terminal:

herd restart

For more information about the available Xdebug settings, please refer to the official Xdebug documentation.