Php – netbeans shows “Waiting For Connection (netbeans-xdebug)”

Can you believe it!? After spending literally HOURS researching this problem, I finally found the cause which I can only classify as a bug. Now, how do I report a bug? That's the next question.

Here's a summary:

create PHP project and setup NetBeans project site root to subfolder. (In order to not register for Apache new test site for any new task I put every new task into subfolder under my local test domain, e.g. http://test.my/project3/ ). NetBeans will not start debugging session automatically in this case. You will see a ‘waiting for connection’ message from the image below. Do not worry. Left it as it is. Go to your browser. I use FireFox 4. And call the script you wish to debug with additional parameter, e.g. http://test.my/project3/index.php?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=netbeans-xdebug

When you return to NetBeans you will see that connection with xdebug is established successfully. To stop XDebug session manually call any script from the same subdirectory with this parameter ?XDEBUG_SESSION_STOP_NO_EXEC=netbeans-xdebug

The complete solution can be found on my newest hero's blog NetBeans 7.0 for PHP Waiting for Connection to XDebug

Edit: Know what I just discovered? I removed index.php as the index file of my run configuration. Works like a charm without having to manually insert the xdebug section of the url.

You can add xdebug lines anywhere to the php ini file most likely at the end. To check if xdebug is correctly installed check phpinfo function and the debugclient. You can get the debugclient at the xdebug homepage: http://xdebug.org/docs/install. When you start it with the switches -i 9000 -r 9000 it should connect to xdebug after then you can verify it with netstat -an | grep 9000. Then you can load an example webpage and look at the output of the debugclient. Just in case check your xdebug log. When it works with the debugclient you have a good proof and you can make it work with your IDE. This help me a lot: http://forums.netbeans.org/topic1513-30.html. You can also check this script if the xdebug is listen to port 9000:

<?php 
     $address = '127.0.0.1'; 
     $port = 9000; 
     $sock = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); 
     socket_bind($sock, $address, $port) or die('Unable to bind'); 
     socket_listen($sock); 
     $client = socket_accept($sock); 
     echo "connection established: $client"; 
     socket_close($client); 
     socket_close($sock); 
?>

It didn't work for me but give it a try? I've lighttpd and xdebug on my virtual machine and I use a reverse shell with my remote server. I use Komodo IDE.