Sebastian's reasoning:

Besides setting the mode with xdebug.mode, you can also set the mode with the XDEBUG_MODE environment variable. If this environment variable is active, it overrides the mode as set through xdebug.mode.

I understand that Xdebug looks at the XDEBUG_MODE environment variable and changes its mode based on that. As far as I can see, though, Xdebug does not provide an API for querying its mode apart from using ini_get('xdebug.mode') (or using xdebug_info(), capturing its output through output buffering, and then parsing the generated HTML).

For a short term solution, this library can fall back to looking for/at the XDEBUG_MODE environment variable. If it is set, its string contents will be treated like the string contents of ini_get('xdebug.mode') is right now:

if (!ini_get('xdebug.mode') || !in_array('coverage', explode(',', ini_get('xdebug.mode')), true)) {

throw new Xdebug3NotEnabledException;

}

The message of Xdebug3NotEnabledException, of course, needs to be adapted.

In the long run, though, I would really like for Xdebug to provide a function that returns information about which mode(s) is/are currently active.

I have settled on the following API:

$ XDEBUG_MODE=debug,coverage php -dxdebug.mode=trace -r 'var_dump(xdebug_info("mode"));'

array(2) {

[0]=>

string(8) "coverage"

[1]=>

string(5) "debug"

}

Does that work for you?

PR @ https://github.com/xdebug/xdebug/pull/737

Thank you for this birthday present ;) Yes, that works for me.

https://github.com/xdebug/xdebug/pull/737