PHP composer xdebug warning

Question

New to PHP. Working on a PHP project and have xdebug enabled to be able to debug my php applications. The production server does not have xdebug enabled because it is handled by

Answer 1

I do not want to disable xdebug when I am developing. Just wanted to confirm that running xdebug in dev environment should have no impact on the composer installing libraries/performance of the app on the production server.

There is a huge impact of just loading Xdebug. It slows the Composer run down by 3x or 4x, even when the profiling feature is not enabled.

In other words: xdebug is invaluable for debugging, but increases the memory used and processing time of Composer.

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How to disable Xdebug for Composer runs?

My suggestion is to write a little invocation helper for running Composer.

The helper is a bash or batch script calling PHP with a custom php.ini, especially configured for Composer. Lets call it: php.ini-composer.

You could copy your current php.ini and adjust it for the Composer run, by removing xdebug or commenting it out, like so: ;zend_extension = "/path/to/my/xdebug.so".

While you are at it: setting memory_limit=-1 is helpful, too.

The full command looks like so on Windows: php.exe -c php.ini-composer composer.phar %*

Just clone the idea for a bash script.

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And you may find the full answer to your question in the Composer FAQ.

https://getcomposer.org/doc/articles/troubleshooting.md#xdebug-impact-on-composer

It was added/updated just a few hours ago.

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Some alternatives (instead of using seperate ini file) are also mentioned here.