The Dutch Web Alliance has posted the sixth part of their series helping you debug/unit test your applications with PHPStorm and Xdebug. In this new post they focus on working with command-line applications.

So there is already a lot covered: debugging web applications, testing your units, getting code coverage. But one thing that remains is trying to debug your command line applications. Even today more and more applications aren’t built for primarily the web, but for other purposes or many web frameworks have some kind of “console” component which allows you to easily create command line tools that deals with asynchronous handling of data, or just mere as cronjobs.

They walk you through the steps you'll need to be sure everything it set up correctly for PHPStorm to catch the debug calls:

• Ensuring Xdebug is active
• Validating that PHPStorm is listening for incoming requests
• Configuring Xdebug on where to connect
• Setting up the mapping for paths inside PHPStorm