Installing Xdebug with Laravel Herd

Herd does not ship with Xdebug out of the box, but you can manually install and compile the Xdebug PHP extension via Homebrew and pecl.

Here are the instructions:

First Install php via Homebrew:

brew install php

Next, pecl install Xdebug

pecl install xdebug

This creates an xdebug.so extension file that you can now activate and use with Laravel Herd.

On an M1/M2 Mac, the extension can be fount at /opt/homebrew/lib/php/pecl. On an Intel Mac, it will be at /usr/local/lib/php/pecl.

Finally, activate Xdebug

You may activate Xdebug by editing your php.ini file. This file is located at ~/Library/Application Support/Herd/config/php/<version>/php.ini..

# Absolute path to the xdebug.so file
zend_extension=/opt/homebrew/lib/php/pecl/20220829/xdebug.so
 
# Enable Xdebug
xdebug.mode=debug

Please read the official instructions for more information, and thanks to BeyondCode for this great app.