Recently, I set up my PHP dev environment to allow me to step debug from unit tests that I run with make unit The relevant parts of Makefile look like this: # Set DEBUG=1 to enable Xdebug ifeq ($(origin DEBUG),undefined) XDEBUG := else XDEBUG := XDEBUG_SESSION=PHPSTORM endif unit: ## Run unit tests docker compose exec php bash -c "$(XDEBUG) vendor/bin/phpunit --testsuite=unit" I can now set a break point and run the unit tests with Xdebug… continue reading.