I'm weaning myself off of PhpStorm for the inevitable day my student license expires. I'm trying to set up PDT (comments regarding other free PHP environment suggestions are appreciated, but do not answer the question).
Anyways, when I add a PHP executable, there is a mandatory option for a debugger. Leaving the default at Zend, when attempting to run a hello world file with the big green button I get a
"Launch Error - Session Terminated"
"Error launching testFile The session could not be started. In order to generate debug information, please make sure that the debugger is properly configured as a php.ini directive."
The question is basically - is this error generated because I haven't set up a debugger? But it follows, if so, to ask if it is possible to use PDT without a debugger. If it is not possible, why? You don't need a debugger for PhpStorm. Is it simply a matter of Eclipse not supporting this use case, or is there a gap of my understanding of the toolchain and is PhpStorm doing something significant to make itself work without a debugger?
And I guess, is there any reason to actually want to not install a debugger besides (the probably negligible) overhead to actually setting it up?
Of course you can use PDT without a debugger. Due to this bug: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=462020, you have to configure executable with xdebug.
You can also create official bug on bugs.eclipse.org to add "none" in php cli configuration.
EDIT:
In PDT 3.5 (Eclipse 4.5 - Mars release), we added "NONE" as possible choice. See: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=467260