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How to install XDebug on MacOS (XAMPP)

· 2 min read
Matej Jelluš
Matej Jelluš
Tech leader and IT nerd who is constantly trying new things, sharing his experiences and still enjoys writing code in his free time. Currently looking for new challenges and opportunities.

When you want to create codecoverage report with phpunit, you need to have XDebug installed otherwise you get just error "No code coverage driver is available". I successfully installed it on Windows but I had lot of issues installing it on MacOS.

Steps​

  • check lot of websites and see that there is still new and new issue
  • prepare everything
  • clone xdebug project
  • build xdebug
  • install
  • enable xdebug module

Prepare everything​

MacOS has php installed with xcode, but I needed to use newer version I am already using with XAMPP. So I just created a link to XAMPP version:

sudo ln /Applications/XAMPP/bin/php /usr/local/bin/php

In XDebug readme is, that you need to use phpize. After I linked that one, it had another problem - "fatal error: 'php.h' file not found". To solve also this problem, you have to link php-config either.

sudo ln /Applications/XAMPP/bin/phpize /usr/local/bin/phpize

sudo ln /Applications/XAMPP/bin/php-config /usr/local/bin/php-config

Clone XDebug project​

You need to clone the source code, so that you are able to build it:

git clone git://github.com/xdebug/xdebug.git

Build XDebug and install it​

phpize

make clean

make

make install

Enable XDebug module​

The last step is to add zend_extension="xdebug.so" in the end of php.ini file. If you do not know where this file is located, just run php --ini.

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