The solution was to use use step-through debugging in PhpStorm. I needed to know what was being returned, but the ham-fisted way I was attempting to find it wasn’t working. Not only did I not see the value that I wanted, I saw an unwieldy stack trace instead. Well, if you’ve ever tried to var_dump a variable in the middle of a PHPUnit test, then you’ll know that PHPUnit doesn’t take kindly to that. Instinctively ( wrongly) I started using PHP’s var_dump method to attempt to see what the value being returned was. However, in others, the values that I expected to be returned, weren’t. In the early stages of development, in some cases, the tests validated that the expected values were being returned. Have a look at the project’s tests for a full list, but here’s a short list. Not such a tricky request, you might think.īut the more test data I fed the code, the more use cases I found which needed to be handled. Its task is to filter a European-format currency string, such as -1.432.156,54 into its integer equivalent. One example is a package called currency-filter.

These dependent packages perform several smaller tasks, ones that don’t belong in the main package. Recently, I’ve been developing a side-project, and have had to create several dependent packages to support it. In this article, I’ll show you how to set up proper debugging with PhpStorm, Xdebug, and PHPUnit, and give you a modern, sophisticated debugging experience. Still using var_dump to debug your PHP code? Stop! While var_dump can be convenient, it’s a very blunt approach.

Phpstorm online