title: PHP debugging on OS X - hopeless?
body: <p>I have tried:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Xdebug and Eclipse. Eclipse launches a web browser, but the browser tries to access a non-existent file in Eclipse's .app bundle.</li>
  <li>Xdebug and NetBeans. It does a little bit better; a browser opens a page in /tmp which says "Launching. Please wait…" but nothing happens beyond that.</li>
  <li>Xdebug and debugclient, the CLI tool which comes with Xdebug. MacPorts (which I used to install PHP and Xdebug) doesn't seem to install this by itself, and when I try compiling it by hand, I get told "you have strange libedit". Installing libedit via MacPorts doesn't solve that.</li>
  <li>Zend's debugger (the precise name escapes me right now) and Eclipse. I can't recall what the problem was, as this was some time ago, but it didn't work.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>With regards to Xdebug, at least, I'm fairly confident I've installed it correctly. It shows up with both a phpinfo() in a PHP file and a <code>php -i</code> in the CLI.</p>
  
  <p>If anyone has managed to get PHP debugging working in some way or other on the Mac, I'd appreciate it if you could share with me how. Littering code with <code>var_dump($foo);die();</code> gets old quick. Bonus points if it can be done <em>without</em> using some bloatware editor like Eclipse, or that expensive proprietary thing Zend wants to sell me.</p>
  
  <p>My server is connecting to PHP via FastCGI, if that makes a diff.</p>