Mac Catalina Install Xdebug

Question

I\'ve been struggling to get xdebug to work all day. I have tried a complete reinstall of homebrew, cleared out php and installed the newest version, reinstalled apache (fo

Answer 1

Each error has a different cause.

First of all, your sudo pecl install is generally the right way of installing Xdebug, because, as you've found you can set the installation directory with pecl config-set.

However, the pecl/pear version that you are running, is likely for an old version of PHP. Because PHP does change once in a while, the pecl tool needs to be updated too. For PHP 7.2, I run pecl version 1.10.9 (you can check with pecl -V). I would think that the one you're running is quite a bit older. Generally you can update pear/pecl by using pear upgrade pear, but you will likely run into an unwritable directory problem again.

Secondly, sudo make install to fails because it is trying to write into an unwritable directory (/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20180731/). If you know what the right directory is (check with php -i | grep extensions), you can just copy it into that directory yourself. After the make stage, there should be a xdebug.so in the modules directory within the Xdebug source tree.

The "official" way to solve the latter problem is to use the --with-php-config option to Xdebug's ./configure line, where you can specify the one that you want to use for Xdebug with something like: ./configure --with-php-config=/usr/local/opt/php@7.2/bin/php-config (but check the paths, as I don't have a Mac set up here). This should then pick up the right extensions directory, and sudo make install should work.