PHP

CodeTracer supports PHP 8.1 and newer.

The recorder for PHP is hosted in the codetracer-php-recorder repo, but you do not install or invoke it yourself — ct finds it.

How to record a PHP program

Use ct record to record and ct replay to open the result, or ct run to do both in one step:

ct run hello.php

To pass arguments to your script, put them after the filename. They reach PHP unchanged, including flags:

ct run script.php --verbose input.txt

Recording a web application

PHP web applications are recorded as a running server rather than a single script. That has its own guide: Live requests — PHP.

In short:

ct record --server --lang php -o ./trace -- php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 -t public/

Then, in another terminal, ct replay -t ./trace shows each HTTP request as it arrives, and double-clicking one jumps to the code that served it. This works with the built-in server and with php-fpm pools; frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony and WordPress need no special setup.

What you do not need to do

• You do not need to edit php.ini or pass -d extension=…. The CodeTracer

extension is loaded for you.

• You do not need to install the recorder separately. If it is genuinely

missing, ct tells you what is absent and how to install it, and exits with a failure rather than leaving an empty recording behind.