Phpstorm + xdebug : Remote host is configured as "localhost" despite server host is probably not local

Question

I was following this instruction to validate my debugger configuration on Web Server. I uses a remote server whose FTP connection has been tested, but I get this warning message saying

Remote host is configured as 'localhost' despite server host is probably not local

My first question is: what does "remote host" and "server host" refer to respectively?

I know remote host is the setting xdebug.remote_host, and according to the xdebug documentation, it is "the host where the debug client is running".

This makes me confused: Isn't the debug client the IDE I am running on my local machine?

If yes, then shouldn't "the host where the debug client is running" be my local machines's IP address? If yes again, should I configure xdebug.remote_host to be my IP?

I tried setting it to my IP, the warning message does't show but it doesn't feel right because later I tried it with a random IP the message also doesn't show.

Secondly, the xdebug documentation also says that this xdebug.remote_host setting will be ignored if xdebug.remote_connect_back is enabled." Although not quite sure what this setting does, I set it to be "On", as the picture shows:

I was hoping this will eliminate the warning message, but it is still there. So how do I get rid of this message?

Answer 1

In my case, I had several apache virtual hosts setup for different projects. I was able to access projects via different urls, like : http://projectname1, http://anotherproject2 .

I was getting that same error in PhpStorm while doing xdebug validation:

Remote host is configured as “localhost” despite server host is probably not local

Problem was fixed, once in php.ini xdebug.remote_host matched the URL of the project I was debugging. So, if I was debugging http://project1, I would have this in php.ini:

xdebug.remote_host="project1"

Having values as 127.0.0.1, or localhost didn't fix it.

Hope it helps someone.