Why are variables not showing in the debug window in PhpStorm?

Question

I have Xdebug working, I can stop at and step through breakpoints. But the variables that it has already reached do not show up in the Variables window. See the picture - variab

Answer 1

I've been banging my head against my desk with the very issue myself for the past few days. Running things in CLI mode (when running tests for example) was fine, but trying to view a site in the browser and getting it to hit a breakpoint, I wasn't seeing any locally initialised variables either.

The issue it appears is the OpCache module. This seems to do some internal optimisations and the vars become non-visible to the Xdebug stack.

Disable the OpCache module by removing the symlink in the PHP modules config and you're able to see the local vars as expected.

I have this running on the latest PHP 7.2 (FPM) on an Ubuntu image in a Docker container.

HTH =)