The large change for the exit-as-a-function proposal has been merged into PHP, which means I had to spend some time finishing and tidying up a Pull Request that Tim Düsterhus had provided.

I also improved Xdebug's CI so that it can run as a separate user.

Right now, there don't seem to be any outstanding issues with PHP 8.4 so I will soon create another alpha (or beta) release so that you can try out Xdebug with the latest beta versions of PHP 8.4's.

I continued with the Native Xdebug Path Mapping project.

This is a separately funded project, I don't classify the hours that I worked on this in "Xdebug Hours". I also publish a separate report on the project page.

Again, I am including it here:

I continued with the parser to parse the path mapping files. The parsing is now finished, although I do still need to modify how the parsed information is stored. Right now, the data structures are not optimised to be able to do line mapping as well.

Because the parser parsers user input, it is important that the parser is rubust. It should be able to handle correctly formatted files, but also files with errors.

It is not always possible to come up with all the failure situations by thinking, and therefore a common technique is to use a fuzzer. For PHP there is Infection PHP for mutation testing for example. For C, and C++, a commonly used tool is AFL++. This provides a compiler wrapper and a run-time to fuzz the input to your application. You first provide a template, which it then modifies to try to break your code.

The template that I used in this case was a minimal map file:

remote_prefix: /usr/local/www
local_prefix: /home/derick/project
/projects/example.php:5-17 = /example.php:8
/example.php:5-17 = /example.php:8-20
/example.php:17 = /example.php:20
/projects/php-web/ = /php-web/

In addition to the template you also need to provide a shim — the program that in my case takes the argument given to it and then parses that as a file. The AFL++ tool's compiler wrapper adds some magic to it to be able to catch errors.

When you then run the fuzzer, such as with:

AFL_SKIP_CPUFREQ=1 afl-fuzz -b 7 -i fuzz-seeds -o fuzz-output -- ./afl-test @@

It then runs your program with your template files (in fuzz-seeds in my example). And then also with loads of variants.

The fuzzer found a few errors in my parser, which ended up crashing it. One such examples that I hadn't thought of is of a line starting with a =:

remote_prefix: /usr/local/www
local_prefix: /home/derick/project
=/example.php:42-5 = /example.php

You can find the other cases it found in a dedicated test file.

In September I hope to finish the parser (by storing things more efficiently internally) as well as creating APIs to do the mapping.

I have created no new videos since last month, but you can see all the previous ones on my channel.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon or via email.

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Besides business support, I also maintain a Patreon page, a profile on GitHub sponsors, as well as an OpenCollective organisation.

If you want to contribute to specific projects, you can find those on the Projects page.

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