This tutorial will go through the process of setting up xDebug on Ubuntu, and a brief explaination of how to use kCachegrind (I use KDE, and this is one of the best apps I have used).

Setting up:

sudo apt-get install php5-dev php-pear kcachegrind

Then install xdebug:

sudo pecl install xdebug


Next, we need to locate the new module and update PHP so that it starts to use it:

find / -name 'xdebug.so'

Grab the full path, we’re going to need it..

Next, you need to create a new config file and put this path into it.

sudo nano -w /etc/php5/conf.d/xdebug.ini


If the file does not exist, add the following, replacing the path with the one you got a minute ago. You also need to decide on a location on where to store the profile files. Somewhere with a big chunk of space ideally. You need to put the full path into the profiler_output_dir parameter (I have a folder in my home directory):

zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20090626/xdebug.so
xdebug.remote_enable=on
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
xdebug.remote_host=localhost
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.profiler_enable=1
xdebug.profiler_output_dir=/home/andy/projects/profiles


Save it (ctrl+o , ctrl+x), and restart Apache:

sudo apache2ctl restart

Done! Make sure yout profile folder exists..

Next time you profile a new file will be created, here is an example:

andy@andy-desktop:~/projects$ ls -lah profiles/
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 64M 2012-01-05 15:06 cachegrind.out.13305
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 106M 2012-01-05 15:20 cachegrind.out.13538
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 106M 2012-01-05 15:21 cachegrind.out.13672
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 192M 2012-01-05 15:53 cachegrind.out.14182
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 364M 2012-01-05 16:08 cachegrind.out.14223
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 192M 2012-01-05 15:54 cachegrind.out.14236
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 61M 2012-01-05 16:19 cachegrind.out.14276
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 135M 2012-01-05 16:07 cachegrind.out.15357
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 61M 2012-01-05 16:35 cachegrind.out.16018


kcachegrind in action

Now open your profle result file in kcachegrind and you can visually inspect which part of your script is eating cpu resources. Callmap & Callgrap provide easy to understand visualizations to find bottlenecks in your script, and also find which lines are causing you the most grief!

Knowing from past experience, some people encrypt the footer file in themes – usually to keep a copyright intact, or links to dodgy businesses.

On rare occasions, people can put backdoors in, allowing people to remotely wipe files or gain information on what is stored on the web server being used.

Being a PHP coder myself, and that I use a Linux box with PHP installed on it, I was able to translate the file down to its source code.

1. Find the “eval” and change it to an “echo”.

2. Run it. In my case, I dropped into a Terminal window and went into the folder the file was (eg cd Desktop/theme/ [enter]) and then typed php -f footer.inc.php >footer.inc.php [enter]

3. For each eval, repeat step 1. Do it one at a time, not running the rest of the code (comment it out) until you replace that eval line. This is for safety reasons, you never want the eval to run on your system. It could do anything, you have no idea.

Eventually, you get the final code output.

This is really annoying, and can be quite destructive if issues like this are not found. The guy I did it for was very grateful since the theme used could have easily deleted everything from his site if ‘&deletefiles=1‘ was added to the end of any address to a WordPress page.

What I came up with is a pretty nifty CakePHP 1.3 component (Not 2.0 because its been a bit of a bitch to me when I first started writing it in v2).

The component is GPL Affero licensed, and can be downloaded from:

https://github.com/andydixon/CakeProcessMail

The component reads emails from an mail/usenet account, split and decode attachments and get plain text version of the message body into a big sexy array where you can then process them however you want. A simple loop could be used to do a file_put_contents to a file, or stick it all in a database.. Whatever you want, really.

Since writing docs is not one of my strong points, this is as much help as I have been so far on using the component:

Stick this file in the controller/components folder, and add it to the $components on the relavent controller.

Usage example:

$this->Processmail->server = '{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl/novalidate-cert}';
$this->Processmail->login = 'username@gmail.com';
$this->Processmail->password = 'password123';
$messages = $this->Processmail->getMessages();
debug($messages);


The server needs to be in the format of php’s imap_open() function, and can handle POP,IMAP,NNTP and Unix Mail Spool