Be able to run PHP code at the paused position

[marnickmenting]

Coming from Xdebug, I often use the Console to execute PHP commands in the context of the breakpoint. This is particular helpful to check if some Service if loaded or not or check the result of some helper function before and after running some code.

Not sure how you can do this exactly, as obviously Ray is not integrated in PHPStorm.

[freekmurze]

It's technically a tall orde. If we figure out to do this, we'll surely add it.

[marnickmenting]

I'd imagine. Was worth a shot 😉

[tpetry]

@freekmurze How about changing the lock so the release of the log is requested from the ray application (instead of pusing data to the port it's now requesting information). And when the lock is not released the ray application could define some php code to which is fed to eval() and the return value again ray()ed.

[tpetry]

My idea yesterday was not really working because of a scope problem, but hey, i found another solution.

So the best we can currently do is something like:

ray(get_defined_vars())->pause();

But this will only stop the script and not output the values. I don't know whether this is is expected or an bug. But we could do something more intelligently with this idea:

ray()->pause(get_defined_vars(), $this);

So with this approach we would pass the actual scope to the paused execution context. As the ray library is now aware of the current variables my old idea from yesterday is working. Similar to artisan tinker console, typed php code within the ray desktop could now be executed within the context of the current running request and you would have access to all variables of the current scope the same as when the code was originally written there. By using bind we can eben change the $this reference so your typed php code can access private/protected methods, attributes.

@freekmurze What's your opinion on this? It would be a huuuge leap forward for ray taking it almost to the same functionality of a full debugger.

[marnickmenting]

I didn't know about get_defined_vars(), thanks for that. ray(get_defined_vars()) already gives some useful information.