Installing xdebug on Apple Silicon

While preferring virtualised development environments using Docker and DDEV, sometimes I work with projects that utilise the Symfony CLI, Valet or PHPs built-in web server. What all of these have in common: they use the locally installed PHP on your macOS. Here's how I added xdebug to it on a Apple Silicon.

A simple pecl install xdebug didn’t do the trick. I ran into two problems. First, the compilation failed, with a Perl error. As it turned out, autoconf, autoheader and autom4te had a shebang line referencing an older perl 5.30 version, while I actually found perl 5.34 to be the installed version.

In order to get xdebug to compile, I had to change the Shebang from #!/usr/bin/perl5.30 to #!/usr/bin/perl5.34 in these 3 files:

/opt/homebrew/Cellar/autoconf/2.72/bin/autom4te
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/autoconf/2.72/bin/autoheader and
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/autoconf/2.72/bin/autoconf

Secondly, it was necessary to tell pecl specifically which architecture I want xdebug to be compiled for, or I would run into another build error.

So arch -arm64 sudo pecl install xdebug was necessary to successfully install xdebug.

It’s worth mentioning that James Titcumb just recently presented a Pre-Release of a streamlined PHP Extension Installer (short PIE) which is set to replace PECL in the near future. Hopefully this will make things even simpler.