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

Direct manipulation of PHP config

Here's my contribution based on a Homebrew-installed PHP installation on Mac OS X.

It's a shell-script wrapper, designed to be saved as an executable file at /usr/local/bin/composer, with the Composer binary at /usr/local/bin/composer.phar:

#!/bin/sh
sed -i '' -e 's:zend_extension="/usr/local/opt/php55-xdebug/xdebug.so":;zend_extension="/usr/local/opt/php55-xdebug/xdebug.so":' /usr/local/etc/php/5.5/conf.d/ext-xdebug.ini
/usr/local/bin/php /usr/local/bin/composer.phar "$@"
sed -i '' -e 's:;zend_extension="/usr/local/opt/php55-xdebug/xdebug.so":zend_extension="/usr/local/opt/php55-xdebug/xdebug.so":' /usr/local/etc/php/5.5/conf.d/ext-xdebug.ini

Theory of Operation

The wrapper script:

• uses sed to temporarily modify the configuration file, disabling Xdebug (line 2)
• executes Composer, passing through args to the command (line 3)
• uses sed to restore the configuration file, re-enabling Xdebug (line 4)

The script is coupled to an OS X/Homebrew installation of PHP 5.5. The paths should be adjusted to work with other PHP versions and other operating systems' and package managers' directory layouts. Note also that some versions of sed do not need the empty-string argument following the -i option.

Caveat Utilitor

The script is straightforward, in that it works directly on the main PHP configuration files, however this is also a drawback: Xdebug will also be disabled for any scripts that happen to be executed concurrently with this script.

In my development environment, this is an acceptable trade-off, given that Composer is executed manually and only occasionally; however you may not want to use this technique if executing Composer as part of an automated deployment process.