Remote debugging using Zend Studio 8 and EC2

Been looking at alternatives to PHPEd and thought I would install Zend Studio to see what it is like.

After install I wanted to debug direct on a EC2 instance I had set up for testing purposes, however I was having great trouble with it, I kept getting errors such as it stalling on “testing communication with client host/IP”

What was happening is that because I am at work the firewall was not allowing data to come back to my desktop PC. To solve this I have to use Tunneling, and also set up Putty to allow me to do this.

If you haven’t already got it, download PuTTY from here.

Then open PuTTY and enter in the EC2 host name

Next click on SSH/Auth and Browse for your Private key file you set up in EC2

Then click SSH > Tunnels and Enter in the following:

Source port: 10137
Destination: 127.0.0.1:10137
Click on Remote
Add

You should get a screen like this:

Go back to Session and Save this so you don’t have to repeat this every time.

Click Open and enter in your login as “root”

You will see something similar to the below:

Now for Zend Studio

Open up the Debugger preferences by going to Window > Preferences > Debug > Installed Debuggers

Configure Zend Debugger and remove everything from Client Host/IP but 127.0.0.1

You will now find that Zend Debugger can connect remotely to your EC2 instance.