Gary Hockin has a recent post showing how you can debug PHP HTTP requests from the command line using PHPStorm and XDebug. These instructions aren't specific to PHPStorm, however. They can be used in any IDE/editor that supports remote XDebug connections.

At PHP North West I had huge difficulties configuring Xdebug and both my PHP and PHP Storm so they play nice in a CLI environment. So here, for others and almost certainly my future self, is how to do it.

He goes through each step of the setup process assuming that you already have the necessary software installed. He shows how to configure XDebug for remote debugging in the ini configuration, setting up PHPStorm to receive the connection and, finally, adding the "XDEBUG_CONFIG" environment variable to tell PHP to relay the requests back to your waiting IDE.