I had to debug a command line PHP script that runs on a remote server and I could not figure out how to do it. I am using PhpStorm and XDebug.

PhpStorm comes with a rich set of configurations to run a PHP script, including a couple of presets for debug. I used them to debug web pages and command line scripts running on the local computer but nothing worked for scripts running on remote servers.

By reading the documentation of XDebug and PhpStorm I learned that some small tasks must be accomplished in order to make PhpStorm and XDebug co-operate for debugging.

The problem

Recently I had to deal with a PHP script that was designed to run as a cron job. It does a simple processing: gets some data, creates a CSV file and sends the file using email.

When I manually ran it on the development environment everything went well except for the email not being sent and this strange line of text sneaked in the script’s output:

sh: 1: -t: not found

The email not being sent wasn’t a surprise, I knew that for some (technical or business) reason, the PHP code is unable to send emails from that particular machine. The strange error message (strange for me) is a different story. It was not generated by my code or by any of its dependencies.