Bence Eros has submitted a new post from his blog that looks at the method he came up with to create an interactive debugger for PHP. It's just a prototype/proof of concept that lets you execute PHP code in the browser (using eval - a little scary, I'll admit).

Last night I created a prototype for an interactive debugger for PHP without the need of any IDE-plugin. In this post I'm going to show what I found. Unfortunately you will need some time to put the environment together, but I think it's worth doing it. My target was to create a way how you can view and modify your variables manually at runtime, only by inserting one line code.

He does mention that, because of the settings he uses, the debugger can only be loaded from a different domain than the application which can be restricted a bit simpler (i.e. its own https or .htauth). His setup uses an Apache2 web server and a few PHP/HTML scripts to get the job done. In the end you'll have something similar to this for you to run your code in.

Ilia Alshanetsky has a suggestion for those setting up PHP and Apache2 for the first time - beware of the default configuration!

About a week ago, I was doing some upgrades on my development machine and came across a rather nasty issue when it comes to how .php(s) files are associated with PHP in Apache. It seems that a number of distros including Gentoo (which is what I was using) are using the [same] configuration directive to make the PHP module parse PHP files

The problem comes from their use of "AddHandler" versus "AddType" when telling Apache which files to parse as PHP. The first allows anything with ".php" in its filename to be parsed while the second limits it to just files ending in ".php". Check your configuration to ensure you're not open to this issue, especially if there's scripts/files outside of your control.

On the HowTo Forge website, there's a new tutorial all set to walk you through hardening your PHP5 setup on Debian Etch/Ubuntu with the help of the Suhosin patch.

This tutorial shows how to harden PHP5 with Suhosin on Debian Etch and Ubuntu servers. [...] This document comes without warranty of any kind! I want to say that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

They start with the initial install of Apache2 and PHP5 (via apt-get) to get the stage set. Building on that is simple - making another apt-get call to pull in the PHP binaries, a wget to grab the latest Suhosin patch, and you're just a few dpkg-buildpackage commands away from having a working setup. Check out the project's configuration page to get more details on tweaking the setup.

From this quick post (on Jeremiah's blog) we learn how to create a simple proxy for your web surfing needs with the help of Ubuntu Linux, Apache2, and PHP4.

Using Ubuntu Linux, Apache2, & PHP4 we can set up our own PHP Proxy page to use at work or school for those web sites you probably shouldn't have access to.

The linux installation isnt covered, but the painless installs of the rest of the apps is summed up in a few simple lines. Following that, he shows you what needs to be edited in the Apache config and where to get the PHP proxy application from.