Setting up Xdebug with Acquia Dev Desktop for local debugging

June 17, 2012

A while back Robert Douglass had written a great guide to setting up Acquia Dev Desktop to use Xdebug on Mac OS X. Looking for it today it looks like the sands of time have erased it from the webs. At the same time the recent versions of Dev Desktop include Xdebug so the process is a little different (and simpler).

In this case I'm setting up Xdebug to work with Komodo IDE and Dev Desktop that comes bundled with Drupal 7. After installing Dev Desktop and setting up your first site it's time to enable Xdebug. In the recent versions of Dev Desktop it ships with Xdebug but the PHP extension is turned off.

The first step is launching the Dev Desktop control panel. Once it has started click the "Settings..." button in the lower right. Then pick the "Config" tab at the top center to see the server configuration. The screen shot here shows PHP 5.2 but the process is the same for 5.2 or 5.3. Whichever version of PHP click the Edit link beside the php configuration files.

This will open the chosen php.ini file in Text Edit. With the file open look for the line containing xdebug.so. If the installation is in the standard directory it will look something like this: Read more about Setting up Xdebug with Acquia Dev Desktop for local debugging

Using Komodo from the command line

January 3, 2011

Anybody who ends up talking about coding with me will likely know that I really like using Komodo IDE. Since just before Christmas I've been using and setting up my new MacBook Air. I took a little different approach with this machine for several reasons. One of the main drivers being the smaller (256GB) "disk" drive. This lead me to build this machine up from scratch, using my cloud applications like Dropbox, rather than copying things from another disk.

One application I've gone back and forth on bringing to the new laptop is BBedit. A long-time BBedit user it has had a home on every machine I've had for decades. However in looking at how I use it the main thing I found was I used it because the command line script made it really easy to launch a GUI editor from the command line. Sure for a lot of things I just use VIM but sometimes I want something more of a Mac application.

Wouldn't it be great if I could just use Komodo IDE for this instead? Why yes it would! So a few minutes later I added these lines to the .bash_profile on my little machine.

alias komodo="open -a 'Komodo IDE'"
alias kedit="open -a 'Komodo IDE'"

Komodo's 4.3 Drupal Goodness and Wishlist

February 24, 2008

Andre posts about Drupal specific snippets coming with the next version of Active State's Komodo IDE. I started using Komodo after the 50 tips and tricks podcast and haven't looked back. Sure I still fire up BBedit for the odd job here and there, but for coding everything from PHP to HTML and CSS Komodo is my tool of choice these days.

With that said there is one Eclipse feature that I'm particularly jealous of. The patch handling features of Eclipse are outstanding. While the snippets will likely be handy there are already pretty simple ways of doing this using things like the module builder module or creating one's own templates in Komodo today. Perhaps some uber-patching features will be included in Komodo 4.4. Unfortunately it looks like that would be another year in the making if the past release schedule is an indication. Nevertheless Komodo will continue to be a tool that runs continuously on my computer.