Working for years with Drupal's command-line tool drush, and more recently with Laravel's artisan, I've had occasion to interface with Xdebug in my favorite IDE, PhpStorm. Here's how I am currently working with all of these tools together.

Incidentally, if you've never tried a real debugger in your projects, you can check out my talk from WordCamp Orange County, "Let's Debug for Real", which was recorded from the audience, or a higher-fidelity version from a JavaScript perspective, my lynda.com course Debugging the Web: JavaScript.

Here's how this will work: you'll do some initial configuration in PhpStorm and your local web stack, set a breakpoint somewhere in your code, then run your command line script from within PhpStorm. If all goes well, execution will stop at the breakpoint and you'll be off to the debugging races.

Learn how to use the command line toolkit Terminus to make deployments of Drupal, WordPress, and Backdrop sites on Pantheon faster and easier.

A debugger is essential for helping understand how code works. In my lynda.com course Debugging The Web: JavaScript, I go over the essential parts of learning how to use one. These concepts are the same across pretty much all debuggers in common use, but there are also different helpful options available in each one that can be helpful.

I haven't upgraded to El Capitan, and may not for a while, but the latest version of Safari is 9.0, and is available for OS X Mavericks, aka 10.9. I upgraded to stay current with the security fixes, and have been pleasantly surprised to see a much improved Web Inspector.