Xdebug not working after Netbeans Update (on MAMP)

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Wed, 03/16/2011 - 15:11

If you use NetBeans IDE and Xdebug for PHP development, at some point, there's a chance you'll run into this. Today, my debugger suddenly stopped working without warning. A quick search at Stackoverflow confirms that lots of people have issues getting and keeping Netbeans and Xdebug talking. I spent several hours trying to determine what caused this.

When I first installed NetBeans, MAMP, and Xdebug last year, I recall that it took me a few hours. A large majority of that time was just adjusting to the differences between Netbeans, Zend Studio, and Eclipse. Overall, I found Netbeans to have a pretty shallow learning curve... that's always a plus. For months, everything worked quite well.

Fast forward to last week: my hard drive crashed, and so I spent Sunday and Monday re-installing all my applications. Luckily, setting up NetBeans (6.9.1), MAMP, and Xdebug was significantly easier this time, since I had done it before. I got everything installed and the debugger working within an hour. I just followed the instructions, and the fresh install worked perfectly. Great, right?

Two days later, though, the debugger was no longer working. I tried everything... changing MAMP settings, php.ini, etc. There are so few debug settings in NetBeans now, that there was nothing that seemed like a likely culprit.

And then it dawned on me: yesterday, NetBeans told me it wanted to update itself. I said "Yes", and let it go on its merry way. I didn't have any more work to do, so I just shut down when it was done.

After I remembered this today, I figured the NetBeans update must be at fault. I deleted my current NetBeans app directory and installed fresh from the web site. Everything is now working perfectly again. I think I'll forego future updates unless I really need them. It's just not worth it most of the time.

I wish I had thought of that before I spent a couple hours fiddling with the config files. Oh well, lesson learned. I hope my experience can benefit someone else.