Installing Xdebug and Webgrind on Ubuntu 16.04 with Apache and PHP

This tutorial will help you install xdebug and webgrind profiling. PHP is NOT running as PHP-FPM.

Install dependencies

apt update
apt install php-dev

Download and compile Xdebug

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/xdebug/xdebug.git
cd xdebug
./rebuild.sh

Notes:

• the ./rebuild.sh shell file is running phpize, ./configure --enable-xdebug, make and make install in the background.
• in my case, the xdebug.so file was installed in /usr/lib/php/20151012/ folder

Install Xdebug

echo "extension=xdebug.so" > /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/xdebug.ini
ln -s /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/xdebug.ini /etc/php/7.0/apache2/conf.d/xdebug.ini
service apache2 restart

To test the installation, create a php file and put phpinfo in it. In the output there should be xdebug.

Enabling Xdebug

In .htaccess file, paste the following:

php_value xdebug.profiler_enable 1

Now, on every request Xdebug will create a cachegrind.out. in /tmp folder that can be read by Webgrind.
Additional information about the configuration can be found on https://xdebug.org/docs/profiler.

Install Webgrind

cd /var/www/html
wget https://github.com/jokkedk/webgrind/archive/v1.6.0.zip
unzip v1.6.0.zip

Now you can access Webgrind from the browser by accessing http://<your_ip>/webgrind-1.6.0/

Rerences:

https://github.com/xdebug/xdebug
https://github.com/jokkedk/webgrind