How does this compare to symfony var dump server (beyondcode/laravel-dump-server)? That thing sends debug/dd messages to your terminal instead of a separate app.
The big advantage of using a separate window, is that things are formatted much more nicely. There’s also two way communication to drive features as pausing the code: https://spatie.be/docs/ray/v1/usage/in-a-framework-agnostic-project#pausing-execution
I generally like the stuff Spatie comes out with but… this is kinda just a log file wrapped in a gui. Does not seem like a $25 product to me.
Seems like one of those situations where they’ve missed the forest for the trees. For example, releasing a library that parses captured dump data as styled, interact-able HTML the way its presented in this electron app would have allowed the same thing and have more use cases.
I wonder how something like this stacks up against clockwork https://github.com/itsgoingd/clockwork
That’s true. And building it yourself is probably a day of work at most.
Buying it is just a nice way to support Spatie.
These tools pop up with the argument that ‘xDebug hard’ and I just don’t get it.
If you’re anywhere beyond junior level you’re doing a disservice to yourself by not spending the hour or two necessary learning how to install and properly use xDebug – in the very least to just figure out if it’s right for your workflow.
I’d even go further and say that if a junior doesn’t have access to a debugger it’s noticeably hampering his learning. So those seniors which are watching him are doing everyone a disservice.
I personally don’t use xdebug because I care about performance in my dev environment more than I do spending a few extra minutes debugging when I have an issue. If I have a really tough issue I’ll pull out xdebug and disable it after I’m done but if it’s just a random what’s this variable at just now once a week, I would rather not have a performance hit constantly.
Sometimes it’s not about xdebug being hard (It’s super simple once you get into) sometimes it’s I don’t want to make a slow codebase slower. Especially if you use it constantly, I’ve had it add seconds to the page request.
Hour or two? I’ve left php development and came back some 4 years later, and I was able to set it up in less than 15 mins.
Imagine thinking setting a breakpoint is less convenient than dumping variabkes, and then later removing those dumps. Imagine not wanting a live repl while in debug mode so you can figure out exactly what it is that you need.
Looks like an advanced printf “debugging” tool.
The point of the xdebug tweet is that actual debugging means stepping through code and being able to see the contents of ALL variables and the execution path one line at a time, including the ones you didn’t explicitly dump (or ray).
But hey, if you like having all these ray statements in your code, go for it.
Do you ever feel the need for it? I used debugger when I was writing C, and even in SQL server, but PHP itself seems so feel to debug via dumps that I find no appeal in the stepping approach, it’s just clumsy in comparison.
Looks nice. We use “dump” and XDebug tracing/profiling. Your article and the XDebug author’s tweet seems to think the two are mutually exclusive. I can assure you there are legitimate needs for both.
We custom rolled a “dump” solution. We use debug($var, $varTwo, ...). We then just tail -f /var/log/PHP/debug.log file, with a little more processing for nice output.
This looks very nice, will definitely give it a try!
waste of time, use xdebug
So, a log console?
Logging was already option 3 that the article conveniently ignored, but this does look like a nice UI if you don’t want to read logs on the terminal and don’t have a dedicated tool for this already.
So, a log console?
That’s no console.. this is a console
http://www.bradkent.com/php/debug/3.0
I use xDebug all the time. A problem I often have is getting the output of some var – and keeping it around after the debug session is finished. It’s manual work and not easy to copy full arrays in phpstorm debug. This tool solves that nicely.
In the PHPStorm variables debugger window, right-click on the variable and select Copy value as.... There’s var_export, print_r, and json_encode.
While this looks really nice, I would appreciate it if it wasn’t an Electron app. The performance is horrible on native Linux devices.