Sometime debugging PHP applications isn't as easy as just pointing your IDE directly at the server and starting to work. Derick Rethans has a new post talking about one such situation, remote debugging with a firewall in between you and the remote machine with XDebug.

The PHP debugging extension Xdebug has "remote" debugging capabilities for single-step debugging PHP applications. This works by setting your favourite IDE into listening mode and instructing Xdebug (with one of the handy browser extensions for example) to initiate debugging. [...] There could however be a firewall in the way that prevents Xdebug connecting directly to your IDE's IP address. That can be because the network you are on employs NAT. [...] In this case, there is no way Xdebug can connect to your IDE's IP address and port. Or is there?

His alternative requires SSH access to the remote machine - building a tunnel from your local machine to the remote server XDebug can use to get around the firewall. He explains the shell command to set up the tunnel and, a more graphical way, through the Putty ssh/telnet client. A quick call to "netstat" can tell you if things are working correctly or not. All that's left then is to point your XDebug to the port on the localhost and you should be good to go on debugging.