xDebug VS PHP Debug Bar

XDebug will let you step through your code and see variable values: https://xdebug.org/

Learn out how to set breakpoints in the code and use an interactive debugger. You can do this in PHP as well as JavaScript.

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).

In your app docker file we will need to install XDebug extension to collect the testing coverage report and create two new files: phpunit-report.xml and phpunit-coverage.xml for testing report and testing coverage.

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.

Debugging with Xdebug: https://xdebug.org/

xdebug

There's an XDebug extension (https://xdebug.org/) for PHP that will permit you to attach a debugger. I haven't tried debugging from VsCode specifically before (I've used NetBeans and also the command-line client before), but the overall idea here is:

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

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.