Disabling xdebug when running composer

Question

When running composer diagnose, I get the following error :

The xdebug extension is loaded, this can slow down Composer a little. Disablin

Answer 1

If you use PHPStorm, the latest release (2016.2) comes with a feature to enable XDebug for CLI scripts on-demand, which means you can simply turn off XDebug globally on your development machine. The IDE will enable it on the fly when it is needed by code inside your projects.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2016/06/xdebug-on-demand-for-cli-php-scripts-in-phpstorm-2016-2-eap/

PhpStorm 2016.2 introduces Xdebug On Demand mode where you can disable Xdebug for your global PHP install, and PhpStorm will only enable it when it needs to — when you’re debugging your scripts, or when you need code coverage reports.

You need to edit your PHP Interpreters preferences to include the path to XDebug, as described in the linked article.

To me this seems like the perfect solution, as I only usually want XDebug while I'm in the IDE.

However XDebug does have other potential uses when you are "offline" e.g. extended stack dumps in error logs, which you would lose by turning it off globally. Of course you shouldn't have XDebug enabled on production, so this would be limited to use cases like beta-testing or automated-testing CLI scripts in development.