
This will fire up your browser of choice, but most likely the page will be blank. You can click the “bug” icon next to the configuration drop down or use the hot key CTRL+D. It seems weird to do it this way but this seems to be the only way to work for me. Check the box that says, “Use path mappings” but don’t specify a path at this time. This brings up the server configuration window. Next, select your PHP Web Application configuration and select the “…” button next to the server configuration name. The first step is to click the drop down title for your application near the top right in PHPStorm and select “Edit Configuration”. To account for this, we will update our configuration to specify the path mapping for the files. They technically start in the “public” folder, which can cause issues when the debugger is looking for the appropriate files. Laravel applications don’t start in the root of your project code. If you don’t know how to set this up, go to your project configuration, and add a new “PHP Web Application” and proceed from there.

Note: These directions assume that you already have a PHP Application configured properly for your Laravel environment. After some trial and error, I’ve finally figured out how to get it working. I use the debugger frequently, but have run into some issues trying to get Laravel apps to debug properly.

It’s the closest I’ve found to a Visual Studio quality IDE for the PHP environment. I’ve mentioned it before, but I REALLY like PHPStorm when I’m doing my PHP development.
