Is it possible to use xdebug on Ubuntu?

Execute the following commands in your terminal.

Download Xdebug - you will need to follow alternate instructions if you don't have PHP5 working on your machine already.

sudo apt-get install php5-xdebug

The package should modify your INI file for you, but just in case you need to edit it yourself open it up and make the following modification - on Ubuntu its typically at /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini - add the following line.

zend_extension="/usr/lib/php5/20110331/xdebug.so"

That path might be a little different on your system - just make sure its a fully qualified path to the xdebug.so file on your machine. Also remember to comment out any references to the Zend Debugger - you can't run both at the same time.

Now restart Apache.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

You may also need want enable html_errors. Search for html_errors in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and make sure it is set to On. A restart of Apache is also required.

html_errors = On

Double-check with phpinfo() to make sure that everything is installed properly - you may also want to set configurations for Xdebug in your php.ini file.

sudo apt-get install php5-xdebug

On a newer Ubuntu (at least on 14.04 LTS), I needed to activate the module as well. So, in total I did:

sudo apt-get install php5-xdebug
sudo php5enmod xdebug

After a restart of the server, xdebug was available.

This article was what helped me in Ubuntu 16.04 running PHP7:
Link to article

sudo apt-get install php-xdebug