Debug the PHP Application with Xdebug, WinCacheGrind and Windows

The Xdebug extension encourages you to troubleshoot your content by giving a great deal of profitable investigate data.

Installing Xdebug for XAMPP with PHP 7.x

Basic Requirements

1. XAMPP for Windows: https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html
2. The VC14 builds require to have the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 x86 or x64 installed
3. The VC15 builds require to have the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2017 x64 or x86 installed

Setup

Download Xdebug for:

1. PHP 7.0.x: https://xdebug.org/files/php_xdebug-2.5.5-7.0-vc14.dll
2. PHP 7.1.x: https://xdebug.org/files/php_xdebug-2.5.5-7.1-vc14.dll
3. PHP 7.2.x: https://xdebug.org/files/php_xdebug-2.6.0-7.2-vc15.dll
4. Copy the file php_xdebug-2.6.0-7.2-vc15.dll to C:\xampp\php\ext
5. Open the file C:\xampp\php\php.ini with Notepad++
6. Disable output buffering: output_buffering = Off
7. Scroll down to the [XDebug] section (or create it) and copy this lines

 
[XDebug]
zend_extension = "c:\xampp\php\ext\php_xdebug-2.6.0-7.2-vc15.dll"
xdebug.remote_autostart = 1
xdebug.profiler_append = 0
xdebug.profiler_enable = 0
xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger = 0
xdebug.profiler_output_dir = "c:\xampp\tmp"
;xdebug.profiler_output_name = "cachegrind.out.%t-%s"
xdebug.remote_enable = 1
xdebug.remote_handler = "dbgp"
xdebug.remote_host = "127.0.0.1"
xdebug.remote_log = "c:\xampp\tmp\xdebug.txt"
xdebug.remote_port = 9000
xdebug.trace_output_dir = "c:\xampp\tmp"
;36000 = 10h
xdebug.remote_cookie_expire_time = 36000

     9. Restart the Apache (Stop/Start)

Now, if you run the phpinfo(); you can see the xdebug extension is enabled

phpinfo

By default Xdebug profile log name as cachegrind.out  You can add extra parameters to make dynamic. For myself, I added %t-%s which formats are

Specifier	Meaning	Example Format	Example Filename
%c	crc32 of the current working directory	cachegrind.out.%c	cachegrind.out.1258863198.xt
%p	pid	cachegrind.out.%p	cachegrind.out.5174.xt
%r	random number	cachegrind.out.%r	cachegrind.out.072db0.xt
%s	script name 2	cachegrind.out.%s	cachegrind.out._home_httpd_html_test_xdebug_test_php
%t	timestamp (seconds)	cachegrind.out.%t	cachegrind.out.1179434742.xt
%u	timestamp (microseconds)	cachegrind.out.%u	cachegrind.out.1179434749_642382.xt
%H	$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']	cachegrind.out.%H	cachegrind.out.kossu.xt
%R	$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']	cachegrind.out.%R	cachegrind.out._test_xdebug_test_php_var=1_var2=2.xt
%U	$_SERVER['UNIQUE_ID'] 3	cachegrind.out.%U	cachegrind.out.TRX4n38AAAEAAB9gBFkAAAAB.xt
%S	session_id (from $_COOKIE if set)	cachegrind.out.%S	cachegrind.out.c70c1ec2375af58f74b390bbdd2a679d.xt
%%	literal %	cachegrind.out.%%	cachegrind.out.%%.xt

Here %s is used for modifying only xdebug.profiler_output_name and not for xdebug.trace_output_name. 

And If you want to get the current profiling log file. you can call the function

xdebug_get_profiler_filename(), which returns the file name as a string

if you enable the xdebug.profiler_enable. it will run every single script. It will run all the time. So instead of that enable the xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger, the benefit of using profiler_enable_trigger you can enable and disable profiling by just pass the special GET or POST parameter XDEBUG_PROFILE to a PHP script. It will turn on profiling just for the one PHP script that receives the parameter. You need not set a value for XDEBUG_PROFILE, it is sufficient to append the parameter to the URL: yourUrl.php?XDEBUG_PROFILE.