Php on Damjan Cvetko

VSCode PHP Debug Update January 2026

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A long overdue update of what was happening in the VS Code PHP Debug extension.

The current version is 1.40.0.

Since it has been so long since the last post, I’ll list the versions and link relevant release issues.

2023-11-07 1.34.0 - Virtual workspaces support

Part of November 2023 release plan, this was connected to people using extensions like SSH FS that add an extra folder to your workspace that lives in a separate schema like ssh://.

VSCode PHP Debug Update November 2023

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a cumulative update post on changes in the VS Code PHP Debug adapter since last year.

The current version is 1.33.1.

Since it has been so long since the last post, I’ll list the versions and link relevant release issues.

1.27.0 - Variable paging

This was still tracked under May 2022 GitHub issue. This is an issue I wanted to solve for a long time, but it was actually VS Code that did not have the right support. The DAP Variable construct understands tha there are namedVariables and indexedVariables. VS Code - as a DAP client - can handle paging only of indexed variables. So the only solution was to present all variables as such. And as an additional quirk, they can only be paged in increments of 100.

VSCode PHP Debug Release April 2022

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I couldn’t make an update in a while, but I did manage to release a few things. February GitHub issue and March GitHub issue and April GitHub issue outline the work done.

The current version is 1.26.1.

Error on irrelevant env configuration

The extension will now throw an error saying Cannot set env without running a program. Please remove env from [xxx] configuration if the configuration contains env and neither program nor runtimeArgs.

VSCode PHP Debug Release January 2022

Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t put up an update or made any releases for a while, but that doesn’t mean nothing was going on. Here is the current release cycle cover GitHub issue. But the most important change was the migration of the extension.

The migration

Just when the year turned to 2022, I wanted to make a small release since I had prepared a PR. However what I saw was that the Personal Access Token (PAT) used to deploy the extension was expired. It felt that this was a good excuse to try to solve one outstanding issue that was left after the code was migrated from Felix Becker’s GitHub account to Xdebug.

VSCode PHP Debug Release September 2021

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a small writeup on the September 2021 release of VSCode PHP Debug adapter extension. A cover issue describing all work can be found on GitHub issues. I intended to do a “release” every month, but I just do incremental releases and write up a monthly (or so) report… It was summer :)

No-folder debugging

A large task was the No-folder debugging. This is when VS Code has the purple status bar, no folder is open at that time, and so no launch.json file is available. I was actually brought to my attention by Microsoft’s VS Code PM. We had a conf call and discussed what can be done to make PHP debugging in VS Code simpler. Especially the initial setup.

Interactive debugging PHP with VS Code and Xdebug

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I presented this talk at a local PHP Meetup, and not to forget about it, here is the (much) cleaned up version in written format.

I have recently taken over development and maintenance of vscode-php-debug project. I have worked with PHP for 15 or more years and interactive debugging was always something I wanted, needed, and tried to push others to also use. I like to start with querying the audience. Who here knows what interactive debugging is? Who used it? With PHP? Specifically with VS Code?

Compiling PHP extension on Windows (update)

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After posting how I compiled Xdebug PHP extension on Windows I got an interesting comment how I can improve the process.

The comment came again from Christoph on Twitter:

Great!

If you'd need bison etc., you can fetch https://t.co/058sby3fSg, and use phpsdk-vs16-x64.bat instead of the x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019.
— Christoph M. Becker (@cmbecker69) August 17, 2021

I wasn’t aware of this precomputed SDK from Microsoft. Here is the link: https://github.com/microsoft/php-sdk-binary-tools

Compiling Xdebug for PHP on Windows

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Derick was nice enough to point out that the soon-to-be-released PHP 8.1 and Xdebug 3.1.0 will need some protocol level adjustments. Since I develop on Windows, building PHP or Xdebug from source isn’t something I did recently. Lets see what we need to do.

First, the nice people of Twitter pointed out prebuilt QA builds can be found on the windows php site: https://windows.php.net/qa#php-8.1

VSCode PHP Debug Release May 2021

Sun, 06 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a small writeup on the May 2021 release of VSCode PHP Debug adapter extension. A cover issue describing all work can be found on GitHub issues.

Switch to Xdebug 3 port

Since Xdebug 2 has been deprecated for a while now, this plugin has switched to default port 9003 - from previous, 9000. The change in Xdebug was introduced by Derick due to often conflicting default PHP-FCGI port also being 9000.

How I took over VSCode PHP Debug extension and broke it on first release

Mon, 31 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am passionate about debugging and debuggers since, well, forever. When I started working with PHP many many years ago this was the one thing that truly bothered me - there was no “native” way to debug the code interactively. Then I discovered Xdebug.

Fast forward to end of 2020, I got the chance to take over maintenance of PHP Debug Adapter for Visual Studio Code and since I already contributed to it and knew a lot about the topic I took it.

Writing your own PHP APM Agent horror stories 2

Thu, 20 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On a nice May day, we spent a whole day going through Elastic APM Go Agent code, to try to figure out why it doesn’t log Spans, and all Transactions of a certain kind are just always not sampled. Once again, because wrote our own Elastic APM PHP Agent, we got bit in the behind and spent a better part of the day WTF-ing through all the code, just to switch ONE BIT in the end, to solve the issue.

Writing your own PHP APM Agent horror stories

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One of my projects the last few months was getting our own PHP framework to send data to Elastic APM for performance logging and debugging. We decide on Elastic APM since we already started using it for our Golang services and wanted a more complete picture.

There will be another post on why and how we implemented this, I just wanted to share one of the horror stories that happened in the last days.