Testing and Troubleshooting the Migration

Learn about the post-migration procedures that must be completed to guarantee that applications operate with PHP 8.

In an ideal world, the migration troubleshooting will take place on the staging server or simulated virtual environment well before the actual move to production. However, as the seasoned developer well knows, we need to hope for the best but prepare for the worst! In this section, we cover additional aspects of testing and troubleshooting that can be easily overlooked.

Testing and troubleshooting tools

There are too many fine testing and troubleshooting tools available to document here, so we focus on a few open-source tools to help with testing and troubleshooting.

Working with Xdebug

Xdebug is a tool that provides diagnostics, profiling, tracing, and step-debugging, among other features. It’s a PHP extension and is thus able to give us detailed information in case we run into problems that we cannot easily solve. The main website is here.

To enable the Xdebug extension, we can install it just as we would any other PHP extension: using the pecl command or by downloading and compiling the source code from here.

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