Quick Stack Trace In PHP With XDebug

Wat happened?

The other day I was dealing with an issue where a php script was outputting a white page.

Browsing error logs proved useless and there was nothing indicating why this was happening.

I remembered the environment had the excellent Xdebug module installed.

It has many features that make debugging php a bit easier.

I turned on xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger, which lets you selectively turn on the profiler by passing in a GET/POST parameter of XDEBUG_PROFILE.

Hitting the script with http://example.com/script.php?XDEBUG_PROFILE created a profile in /tmp.

Being too lazy to setup Webgrind or kcachegrind, I tried to load the file in my editor of choice: vim.

I figured there'd be a way to read the call graph...but the profile's format wasn't meant to be human readable.

Curiously, the last function call was register_shutdown_function.

I had forgotten that this function existed.

But another thought came to mind. It went a little something like this:

<?php
function shutdown()
{
  throw new Exception('kablooey');
}

register_shutdown_function('shutdown');

Bam, stack trace!

Thank you Xdebug.

For your information, the offending code looked like this:

<?php
// some random function called deep in the stack
if ($something) {
  die('');
}