Critical Masses Technology, Inc.

The bane of my existence has been for quite some time the inability to get XDebug to work in a 64-bit Windows environment. I’ve had to resort to running my development AMP stack (Apache, MySQL, NetBeans) in either an Ubuntu x32 or XP 32 bit VM to work around this defect. Of course, I’d much rather not have to start a resource heavy VM to do dev work and this inability to step through a script on my native 64-bit desktop (formerly Vista, now -Halleluja!- Windows 7) always vexed me. I just revisited the issue and found that by copying and pasting the results of a phpinfo() page into XDebug’s helper page  you’ll get instructions on which .dll to download, where to put it, etcetera etcetera. Lastly, you’ll want to follow the Netbeans wiki’s instructions on how to configure XDebug, notably appending the following to php.ini:

xdebug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
xdebug.remote_mode=req
xdebug.remote_host=127.0.0.1
xdebug.remote_port=9000

Got all that? Next, fire up Netbeans, set a breakpoint and press debug. Voila!