xDebug VS PHP Debug Bar

Is a Docker WordPress Environment focused on the development of WordPress plugins and themes, supports WP-CLI, phpMyAdmin, Xdebug and WordPress Coding Standards - WPCS.

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Psalm, a static analysis tool that can help you identify potential bugs and things that might not be considered best practice, and XDebug, a debugging and profiling extension for PHP.

Step debugger

XDebug

Xdebug, per the official website, “is an extension for PHP, and provides a range of features to improve the PHP development experience”.

or var-dump() but what you probably want is a step debugger like XDebug.

There's FirePHP (I've never used it) but the most straightforward way to inspect variables is Xdebug (supported by PhpStorm, Visual Studio Code and NetBeans).

Before the introduction of debuggers like XDebug and ZendDebugger, developers were forced to spend excessive time understanding the root cause of an application’s misbehavior.

Using Xdebug's profiling features. This takes some time to learn and setting up to your environment.

Setup PHP with XDebug: This section installs PHP with XDebug, which is a PHP extension that is critical to generating the coverage report file labeled "coverage.xml". For projects written in other programming languages, this section of the CI pipeline is usually where necessary setup for running the unit tests is done.

You can also try something like http://phpdebugbar.com/ which maybe will be somewhere in the middle.

This is a package to integrate PHP Debug Bar with Laravel. It includes a Service Provider to register the debugbar and attach it to the output. You can publish assets and configure it through Laravel. It bootstraps some Collectors to work with Laravel and implements a couple custom Data Collectors, specific for Laravel. It is configured to display Redirects and (jQuery) Ajax Requests. (Shown in a dropdown) Read the documentation for more configuration options.