Xdebug Not Working with Windows 10, WSL and VS Code

Describe the bug I just started using WP Local Docker, so thank you so much for developing such a great resource. Since I’m not super familiar with Linux and Docker, it’s taking me some time to get up to speed. The good news is that I’ve got most things configured at this point. The only item I can’t figure out is Xdebug.

When I try to run debugging using VS Code, breakpoints don’t work and I get this message in debug.log on every page load:

Xdebug: [Step Debug] Could not connect to debugging client. Tried: 10.0.128.3:9003 (from HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR HTTP header), host.docker.internal:9003 (fallback through xdebug.client_host/xdebug.client_port) :-(

I’ve used Xdebug a lot in the past, so I’m pretty confident I know how to use it generally, but I can’t seem to get it working with Windows 10, WSL and Docker. Can you give me any advice?

Thanks a ton.

Environment information

• Device: Acer Laptop
• OS: Windows 10 with WSL
• Docker Desktop version: 4.5.1
• Browser and version: Chrome v99.0.4844.51
• WordPress version: 5.9.2

[jg314]

I was finally able to get Xdebug working with WSL 2, Docker and WP Local Docker. I followed very closely to the steps outlined at https://github.com/10up/wp-local-docker-v2/issues/294#issuecomment-1073308040.

Here are the steps I followed in case this will help someone else:

1. Start Docker Desktop.
2. Within the WSL 2 terminal enter this command to get the needed IP address: ip addr show eth0 | grep -oP '(?<=inet\s)\d+(\.\d+){3}'
3. Open the file at /config/php-fpm/docker-php-ext-xdebug.ini within the WP Local Docker website you’re working on. Set xdebug.client_host to be whatever IP address was returned in step 2. For example, the final line might look like xdebug.client_host = 192.168.119.150. Until we can find a better solution, you’ll need to repeat steps 2 and 3 every time WSL 2 restarts.
4. Run 10updocker stop all in the WSL 2 terminal.
5. Run 10updocker start env-name in the WSL 2 terminal. Make sure to replace env-name with the name of your environment.
6. If you get the error Xdebug: [Step Debug] Time-out connecting to debugging client... take a look at https://xdebug.org/docs/all_settings#start_with_request. It’s likely Xdebug is running on every page load, even if VS Code isn’t debugging.

For what it’s worth @LoveDuckie, I didn’t need to change the Remote.WSL2: Connection Method setting in VS Code. It worked with the default wslExeProxy option for me.

Thanks again for the help @LoveDuckie and @nicholasio.

[nicholasio]

FWIW: I think we would not have this problem if we were running the docker daemon inside WSL 2 directly instead of Docker Desktop.