Drupal: debugging to a file

Drupal and debugging often means using Devel, which ships with some very useful functions like dpm(), kpr(), dpq() and more for outputting debug stuff, but these sometimes fail to display things on your site due to some reasons (e.g. called too late, an issue with a template, AJAX…).

Devel ships with a bit more magic that can help though, you can simply use dd() which “logs a variable to a drupal_debug.txt in the site’s temp directory”, so you can simply do

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<?php              
dd('something');                        

in your code, and then tail -f /tmp/drupal_debug.txt for live feed of your debug goodies (or just open the file in an editor like a normal person).

Happy debugging!

Note: This is more-or-less a last resort help for me, I prefer using breakpoints in my IDE which is way better and does not require knowing any of this. But I though dd() was cool as well :-).