Derick Rethans has posted another in his series covering the latest release of the Xdebug debugging tool for PHP, version 2.3. In this new article Derick introduces the "shared secret" handling, a custom string that for the "XDEBUG_PROFILE" that can trigger the the profiler to start.

Xdebug's profiling and trace file capabilities can both be triggered by a cookie, GET or POST variable, as long as you have enabled xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger and/or xdebug.trace_enable_trigger. With these triggers enabled, basically anybody could initiate a profile run, or trace file, by simply sending the XDEBUG_PROFILE or XDEBUG_TRACE cookies with an HTTP request. Although you should not really run Xdebug in production, you can see that this is not an optimal solution. Xdebug 2.3 adds supports for shared secrets for the trace file and profiler triggers through the xdebug.trace_enable_trigger_value and xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger_value.

He points out a browser extension, The easiest Xdebug, that already has support for this new feature. He also mentions two other tools but they have yet to integrate support for these shared secrets (but will soon hopefully): Xdebug halper and xdebug-helper-for-safari .