When you try to build xdebug on macOS Catalina you will get errors like these:
We recommend following these steps for those with the following operating systems running on a Mac: macOS 10.13 High Sierra, macOS 10.14 Mojave, and macOS 10.15 Catalia onward. It isn't always possible to download these Xcode Command Line Tools, following these steps, on Mac’s running older operating systems. Xcode 12.1: macOS Catalina 10.15.4 (Intel-based Mac) macOS Big Sur 11 (Apple silicon Mac) iOS 14.1 macOS 10.15.6 tvOS 14 watchOS 7 DriverKit 19: x8664 armv7 armv7s arm64. The macOS 10.15.3 SDK provides support for developing apps for Macs running macOS Catalina 10.15.3. The SDK comes bundled with Xcode 11.3 available from the Mac App Store. For information on the compatibility requirements for Xcode 11.3, see Xcode 11.3 Release Notes.
Configure and build xdebug on macOS Catalina
The reason for these errors is that the /usr/include folder is missing because Apple removed it when they released Xcode 11.
But, you can work around this problem. Here is how:
First, you need to make sure that Xcode and the command line tools installed. Open a terminal window and run the following command to display the SDK path:
This command should output something like this:
If not, install the command-line tools with executing:
and follow the instructions. After the installation is finished, start Xcode App to make sure the installation is done.
Now try to display the SDK-Path again:
The php tools needed to compile an extension try to use this missing include folder. We will create a modified version of phpize and php-config which will use the includes from the macOS SDK. First we will copy phpize and php-config and then we will modify these copies with a patch.
We create a new folder in your home directory under /Users/YOUR-USERNAME with the name 'php-private'..
Now copy phpize and php-config to php-private
Now determine which PHP version is installed on your system by executing
You should get something like this
I have prepared two patches to simplify the process. Download the two files and save them in your Downloads folder.
Download the phpize patch phpize-catalina.patch.zip and save it. The contents of the patch file for reference:
For PHP 7.3.9 Download the php-config patch php-config-7.3.9-catalina.patch.zip and save it.
For PHP 7.3.11 Download the php-config patch php-config-7.3.11-catalina.patch.zip and save it.
The contents of the patch file for reference:
Extract the compressed patch files.
PHP 7.3.9:
PHP 7.3.11:
Now we patching our copy of phpize and php-config
PHP 7.3.9:
PHP 7.3.11:
We are ready to compile xdebug
Create a working directory in your home folder. We will build xdebug here
Download xdebug from Xdebug.org and save in under Downloads.
Copy the archive to the working directory and extract it.
Now, we run our patched phpize in the xdebug folder.
When everything went good, you get something like this:
If so, you can skip the next part and continue with configuring and installing Xdebug.
Errors like these means, you need to install some requirements.
If phpize prints lines like these, you need to install autoconf:
To install autoconf, execute the following commands:
Now run our patched phpize in the xdebug folder again.
Check the output, and if everything went good, continue.
Configure and build xdebug:
Now we will find the full path to our patched php-config. This can be done like this:
The output will something like:
Xcode Macos 10.15
Replace '/Users/YOUR-USERNAME/php-private/php-config' with the output of the above command and configure xdebug by executing:
In the output of configure you will see that the SDK path is being used:
Now build the extension
Xcode Requires Macos 10.15.2 Or Later
We don't executing 'make install' to install xdebug.so because the macOS System Integrity Protection (SIP) will not allow us to install xdebug to the /usr/lib/extensions folder. To workaround this, we install the extension under the /usr/local folder.
Now edit your php.ini (usually under /etc/php.ini) to load the right xdebug. PHP searches for extensions in its default extension directory. Our xdebug resides outside of this directory, so we have to specify the full path:
To test it, execute:
The output should begin like this:
Restart your apache web server to activate your changes