README

Installation and Usage

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

Download the archive and simply

<?php
require '/kint/Kint.class.php';

Or, if you use Composer:

"require": {
   "hackerpro536/kint": "^1.0"
}

Or just run composer require hackerpro536/kint

That's it, you can now use Kint to debug your code:

########## DUMP VARIABLE ###########################
Kint::dump($GLOBALS, $_SERVER); // pass any number of parameters

// or simply use d() as a shorthand:
d($_SERVER);


########## DEBUG BACKTRACE #########################
Kint::trace();
// or via shorthand:
d(1);


############# BASIC OUTPUT #########################
# this will show a basic javascript-free display
s($GLOBALS);


######### WHITESPACE FORMATTED OUTPUT ##############
# this will be garbled if viewed in browser as it is whitespace-formatted only
~d($GLOBALS); // just prepend with the tilde


########## MISCELLANEOUS ###########################
# this will disable kint completely
Kint::enabled(false);

ddd('Get off my lawn!'); // no effect

Kint::enabled(true);
ddd( 'this line will stop the execution flow because Kint was just re-enabled above!' );

Note, that Kint does have configuration (like themes and IDE integration!), but it's in need of being rewritten, so I'm not documenting it yet.

Tips & Tricks

• Kint is enabled by default, call Kint::enabled(false); to turn its funcionality completely off. The best practice is to enable Kint in DEVELOPMENT environment only (or for example Kint::enabled($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] === '<your IP>');) - so even if you accidentally leave a dump in production, no one will know.
• sd() and ddd() are shorthands for s();die; and d();die; respectively.
  • Important: The older shorthand dd() is deprecated due to compatibility issues and will eventually be removed. Use the analogous ddd() instead.
• When looking at Kint output, press D on the keyboard and you will be able to traverse the tree with arrows and tab keys - and expand/collapse nodes with space or enter.
• Double clicking the [+] sign in the output will expand/collapse ALL nodes; triple clicking big blocks of text will select it all.
• Clicking the tiny arrows on the right of the output open it in a separate window where you can keep it for comparison.
• To catch output from Kint just assign it to a variable^beta

$o = Kint::dump($GLOBALS); 
// yes, the assignment is automatically detected, and $o 
// now holds whatever was going to be printed otherwise.

// it also supports modifiers (read on) for the variable:
~$o = Kint::dump($GLOBALS); // this output will be in whitespace

• 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 huge objects)
  • !d($var) will show expanded rich output.
  • -d($var) will attempt to ob_clean the previous output so if you're dumping something inside a HTML page, you will still see Kint output. You can combine modifiers too: ~+d($var)
• To force a specific dump output type just pass it to the Kint::enabled() method. Available options are: Kint::MODE_RICH (default), Kint::MODE_PLAIN, Kint::MODE_WHITESPACE and Kint::MODE_CLI:

Kint::enabled(Kint::MODE_WHITESPACE);
$kintOutput = Kint::dump($GLOBALS); 
// now $kintOutput can be written to a text log file and 
// be perfectly readable from there

• To change display theme, use Kint::$theme = '<theme name>'; where available options are: 'original' (default), 'solarized', 'solarized-dark' and 'aante-light'. Here's an (outdated) preview:
• Kint also includes a naïve profiler you may find handy. It's for determining relatively which code blocks take longer than others:

Kint::dump( microtime() ); // just pass microtime()
sleep( 1 );
Kint::dump( microtime(), 'after sleep(1)' );
sleep( 2 );
ddd( microtime(), 'final call, after sleep(2)' );