For those wanting to check out the latest preview of the Zend Z-Ray stand-alone version, Rob Allen has posted a full Ansible script to help building the environment much easier.

Recently, Zend made available a Z-Ray Technology Preview which takes the Z-Ray feature of Zend Server and makes it stand-alone. This is very interesting as it means that I can run it with the PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Vagrant set up that I prefer. I decided to create an Ansible playbook to install Z-Ray into my VM. The Z-Ray instructions are clear enough, so it was simply a case of converting them to a set of YAML steps as who wants to do manual installation nowadays?!

The configuration is set up to run on a Ubuntu machine with PHP 5.6 installed. It will download the Z-Ray plugin, extract it and copy over all necessary configuration files to get it up and running. This stand-alone version can help to make debugging your applications simpler with real-time information right in your browser.