The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted by i>Miguel Ibarra Romero showing how to use the PsySH tool to do some interactive debugging of your PHP applications via both the command line and a web frontend.

It’s 1:00 a.m., the deadline for your web application’s delivery is in 8 hours… and it’s not working. As you try to figure out what’s going on, you fill your code with var_dump() and die() everywhere to see where the bug is. [...] Is this situation familiar to you? PsySH to the rescue. PsySH is a Read-Eval-Print Loop (or REPL). You may have used a REPL before via your browser’s javascript console. If you have, you know that it possesses a lot of power and can be useful while debugging your JS code.

He walks you through the install via Composer and some of the basic commands and syntax for executing PHP code inside its shell. Command line testing is good, but debugging full applications is a bit more difficult. He shows how to integrate the tool into a sample application that calls PsySH via a "debug" call and output via a set of "window" objects. He also includes a bit close to the end about debugging with unit tests, executing them from inside the shell as well.

Allan MacGregor introduces you to Psych in his latest post today. Psysh is a runtime developer console, interactive debugger and REPL for PHP.

Psysh is actually more than a simple REPL it's also an interactive debugger; which means you can say goodbye to the endless barrage of var_dump() and die() statements. But do we really need another REPL for PHP, well honestly we could probably get by with the solutions currently available however Psysh has an extremely interesting Ace under the sleeve, it can also function as a realtime debugger.

He includes a few terminalcasts showing some of the commands Psysh offers from the expected output of variable value out to a handy link to the PHP documentation. An example of the useful object output is also included, enabling the showing of methods and properties.