Kint - debugging helper for PHP developers

What am I looking at?

At first glance Kint is just a pretty replacement for var_dump(), print_r() and debug_backtrace().

However, it's much, much more than that. Even the excellent xdebug var_dump improvements don't come close - you will eventually wonder how you developed without it.

Just to list some of the most useful features:

Installation

One of the main goals of Kint is to be zero setup.

Download the file and simply

<?php

require 'kint.php';

Or, if you use Composer:

composer require kint-php/kint

Usage

<?php

Kint::dump($GLOBALS, $_SERVER); // pass any number of parameters
d($GLOBALS, $_SERVER); // or simply use d() as a shorthand

Kint::trace(); // Debug backtrace
d(1); // Debug backtrace shorthand

s($GLOBALS); // Basic output mode

~d($GLOBALS); // Text only output mode

Kint::$enabled_mode = false; // Disable kint
d('Get off my lawn!'); // Debugs no longer have any effect

Tips & Tricks

Kint is enabled by default, set Kint::$enabled_mode = false; to turn its functionality completely off. The best practice is to enable Kint in a development environment only (or for example Kint::$enabled_mode = ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] === '<your IP>');) - so even if you accidentally leave a dump in production, no one will know.
Kint has keyboard shortcuts! When Kint is visible, press D on the keyboard and you will be able to traverse the tree with arrows, hjkl, and tab keys - and expand/collapse nodes with space or enter.
Clicking the + sign or the bar will open/close it.
Double clicking the + sign will open/close it and all its children.
Triple clicking the + sign in will open/close everything on the page.
See the tiny arrows on the right of the output? Click them to open the node in a separate tab, or to show the access path for the value.
There are a couple of real-time modifiers you can use:
- ~d($var) this call will output in plain text format.
- +d($var) will disregard depth level limits and output everything. (Careful, this can hang your browser on large objects!)
- !d($var) will expand the output automatically.
- -d($var) will attempt to ob_clean the previous output.
- You can combine modifiers too: ~+d($var)
To change display theme, use Kint_Renderer_Rich::$theme = '<theme name>'; where available options are: 'original.css' (default), 'solarized.css', 'solarized-dark.css' and 'aante-light.css'. You can also pass the absolute path to a CSS file to use that instead.
dd(), sd(), and ddd() were removed in Kint 2, but you can make them yourself with helper aliases
Read the full documentation for more information

Authors

Jonathan Vollebregt (jnvsor)
Rokas Šleinius (raveren)

License

Licensed under the MIT License

bojoer/kint