The Dutch Web Alliance has posted the latest part in their "remote debugging with PHPStorm" series (parts one & two are linked here) with part three. This time they focus on setting up Xdebug and configuring the connection in the IDE.

Let’s start with probably the most important part of all: debugging your web applications. In this day and age, people still use var_dump() and die() to debug their application. A shame really, knowing that step-debugging through your code is made really easy with PHPStorm. Using var_dump() is very slow, error prone and you only get a small fraction of the context you need in order to debug correctly. And how many times did such a var_dump() hit your production environment?? Truth be told, implementing XDebug does need a little bit of work, but fortunately PHPStorm has made things super easy for us.

They don't go through the whole installation part of Xdebug - there's other guides for that - but do help you configure it correctly to work with a remote debugger in PHPStorm. They show you how to set various breakpoints and a "trick" to working with path mappings.