I used PHP a lot in the past for our websites. I think its not the best programming language, but its simple enough to get things done very quickly. And it runs on the most servers of web hosters.
Today most likely I would choose another language, but I still have to maintain and debug PHP scripts once in a while.
Usually its very painfull, since most of the times I don’t have a running webserver on my local machine. Just makes no sense to have a webserver running all the times. Not to mention a running instance of MySQL.
So I ended up using a simple text editor and uploading the files to my webserver for testing.
Of course without debugger thats a very painfull and slow process. I am still puzzled how many PHP developers use echo commands to debug there code.
In the past I used a commercial Zend Studio license. I still have that running on my Mac. However I also wanted a simple solution I can use easily on my Linux notebook.
So I created a virtual machine for PHP debugging. It runs an Apache webserver with, MySQL + phpMyAdmin and Netbeans as IDE. Xdebug is configured in PHP.
I am publishing it here with the hope it might be useful for other:
