PHP Tools for Visual Studio - Documentation

Getting Started

Welcome to PHP Tools for Visual Studio Code. This extension turns your Visual Studio Code into a powerful PHP development environment, including code editor, debugger, built-in server, and PHPUnit tester.

Product Activation

The product is licensed to our active subscribers. See the purchase page for more information.

Open the Command Palette from the View menu and search for the command PHP Tools: Activate extension. Enter the license key into the pop-up window below and press Enter. Note: the activation process requires an Internet connection.

Enter License Key

Opening a Folder

Open Folder with the PHP application to get the most of the extension.

Open Folder with PHP code

The opened folder allows to initiate debugging, provides complete code completion, navigation features, code problems analysis, and allows for additional workspace settings like formatting and used PHP version, and more.

Enable Debug

Create launch settings, so VS Code will run and debug the PHP. Navigate to Run and Debug view, and create a new launch.json file. If asked for the environment, select PHP (Xdebug).

PHP debug launch.json

This create a default launch settings with common launch profiles:

launch profiles

  • Launch built-in server starts PHP development server within your opened folder, checks for the debugging capabilities, and starts listening for the Xdebug connections.
  • Launch current script in console runs and debugs the currently opened PHP document as a console PHP program.
  • Listen for Xdebug starts debugging and waits for an incoming Xdebug connection.

The launch profiles and corresponding settings can be added, removes or edited in the created .vscode/launch.json file.

Configuring PHP

The vast majority of the extension's features work out of the box. The debugger and test explorer functionalities require, however, a working installation of PHP together with Xdebug extension.

See selecting PHP version for more information.

See Also