PHP xDebug works from browser but not from CLI

Docker Engine General
1

I’ve grown to absolutely love Docker and have several webapp containers, a DB container, ElasticSearch, etc. Everything works beautifully, including xdebug. I have a single php.ini on the container, and use a different xdebug port for each app/container. A few are Apache+mod_php, a few are Nginx+PHP-FPM - it doesn’t matter, it works fine so long as I use the browser to run the project and it appends the ?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=netbeans to the URL.

The only thing I cannot seem to figure out is - no matter what I try, I cannot make xdebug work on the command line, to debug php console commands. These files are in the same project in the same folder as my working web project, so I don’t think file mapping is the problem. I thought I might need to expose the xdebug port (eg 9000) in the docker run command, but that didn’t have any effect. Even if I start the debugger, make the connection via the browser, and then run a cli command, it never stops on debug points.

Has anyone else run into this?

2

in case anyone else lands here googling, answer here worked for me. (tho case was inverse)

it was related to IntelliJ option which ignores external connections from unregistered servers

3

Working Solution - here is my xdebug.ini

zend_extension=xdebug

[xdebug]
xdebug.mode=develop,debug
xdebug.client_host=host.docker.internal
xdebug.start_with_request=yes
xdebug.log_level=1
xdebug.log=/dev/null
#xdebug.profiler_enable=1
#xdebug.profiler_output_name=cachegrind.out.%u
#xdebug.profiler_output_dir="/tmp/docker-xdebug"
#xdebug.output_dir="/tmp/docker-xdebug"

In docker-compose.yml I have

      PHP_EXTENSION_XDEBUG: "1"
      PHP_IDE_CONFIG: "serverName=<your_site_local_hostname>"
      XDEBUG_SESSION: "1"

under environment stanza.

With PHPStorm, Docker-Compose & Docker I can xdebug in browser and in cli when exec’ing into the container. Pretty much the holy grail!

Enjoy -