MediaWiki-Docker/Configuration recipes/Xdebug

XDebug
To use XDebug with MediaWiki running inside a docker container, you have to tell the PHP environment running inside the container to connect to the IDE on the host machine. To do this, set the  variable in your   file:

Latest Version (3.0+)
Starting in version 3.0, XDebug's default port is 9003.

Older Versions (2.x)
Older versions of XDebug (< 3.0) use a different syntax for, and use port 9000 by default:

The following values may have to be adjusted for your system:
 *  or  : this has to be the IP address of the host system (your laptop) as seen from inside the container. Generally, this will just the IP address assigned to the host in the local network. On Linux, you can use   or   to list these addresses. Caveat: if you are running docker in a virtual machine, additional configuration may be necessary. If you are using Docker Desktop (on Mac or Windows), set   to.
 *  or  : adjust this to the port the IDE is listening on (or a port that is configured to forward to the IDE). For XDebug 3.0 and up, the default port is 9003; for XDebug 2 port 9000 is the default.
 *  : the key to use when connecting to the IDE. This has to match the key configured in the IDE. For PhpStorm, the default is, for VS Code it's
 *   : the server name to use by PhpStorm to apply path mappings when manually running command line scripts (see PhpStorm documentation ). Caveat: as of November 4 2020, PHP_IDE_CONFIG needs a patch for docker-compse.yaml . And it still didn't quite work for me.

IDE Integration
For integration with VS code, see the Xdebug config for VS Code recipe.

For integration with PhpStorm, see the blog post on Debugging MediaWiki with PhpStorm. If you use PhpStorm to run the code, you may not need the above configuration, since PhpStorm will set the appropriate environment variables automatically.

Troubleshooting
Debugging your debugger? Here are some tips if things are not working.

1. Shell into your running Docker container for MediaWiki PHP and ensure that the proper environmental variables have been set using the   command.

2. Ensure that XDebug is present in your PHP installation:

3. Try running the XDebug CLI from inside your container; if this works, then the problem likely lives at the level of IDE configuration or a firewall which blocks the request (on Linux, you may take a look at your  or   rules).