Cannot parse server name for external Xdebug connection

Question

I have a Docker container with xdebug in it, when I run the script I need to form the Docker container I receive from PhpStorm the following message:

Cannot parse server name for external Xdebug connection.
To fix it create environment variable PHP_IDE_CONFIG on the remote server.
Windows: set PHP_IDE_CONFIG="serverName=SomeName"
Linux / Mac OS X: export PHP_IDE_CONFIG="serverName=SomeName".

but I have already set those environment variables as you can see in the screenshot here:

xdebug.log

Here is the xdebug section from my phpinfo():

And these are my settings for PhpStorm:

Environment from phpinfo():

PHP Variables from phpinfo():

I also tried to export env variables with and without quotes but the result was the same...

With quotes:

XDEBUG_CONFIG="remote_host=192.168.1.110"
PHP_IDE_CONFIG="serverName=docker-server"

Without quotes:

XDEBUG_CONFIG=remote_host=192.168.1.110
PHP_IDE_CONFIG=serverName=docker-server

The result from ifconfig en1 inet command from my MacOS where I'm running Docker and PhpStorm

You can also check the following files in cases needed:

• Dockerfile.development
• docker-compose.yml
• environment.development
• php.ini

Any help will be much appreciated!

Update:

Seems that if I add

environment:
  XDEBUG_CONFIG: "remote_host=192.168.1.110"
  PHP_IDE_CONFIG: "serverName=docker-server"

into my php service located inside docker-compose.yml it solves the issue but leaves me with a big question.

Since I have:

env_file:
  - ./etc/environment.yml
  - ./etc/environment.development.yml

and inside ./etc/environment.development.yml I have:

XDEBUG_CONFIG="remote_host=192.168.1.110"
PHP_IDE_CONFIG="serverName=docker-server"

And since it is not ignored and I can see that those Env variables are set even before I add environment property into my php service, why xdebug is only triggered when I have set the environment property? It feels like duplication for me to have it in both places and I prefer to have it inside ./etc/environment.development.yml rather than docker-compose.yml.

Answer 1

After some more digging,

I saw the following difference:

When I use env_file directive I had the following in my environment.development file:

XDEBUG_CONFIG="remote_host=192.168.1.110"
PHP_IDE_CONFIG="serverName=docker-server"

which resulted in:

Notice the double quotes around the value.

When I was removing env_file directive and put the following:

environment:
  XDEBUG_CONFIG: "remote_host=192.168.1.110"
  PHP_IDE_CONFIG: "serverName=docker-server"

Then I had this in phpinfo():

So in the end what I did was, I removed environment directive and put back the env_file directive and inside environment.development file I removed the double quotes around the value, so now it looks like that:

XDEBUG_CONFIG=remote_host=192.168.1.110
PHP_IDE_CONFIG=serverName=docker-server

And now it works fine :)

I filled a bug report in PhpStorm youtrack.

Answer 2

I had the same issue with double quotes but in docker-compose. First version was wrong, removing double quotes solved it:

    environment:
      - PHP_IDE_CONFIG="serverName=local"
      - PHP_IDE_CONFIG=serverName=local