Platform specific instructions:
MacOS
- Mac Development System With Mamp
- Mac Development System With Homebrew
- Mac Development System With MacPorts
Docker
Windows
Ubuntu
- No specific dev instruction, but the server install instructions covers most of what you need
IDEs
The pages in this section give tips on how to create Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for developing, debugging and committing code. IDEs are software applications, or combinations of software applications that allow you to develop, test and debug code on your computer.
General tools
- Debugger-Console
- Kint
- XDebug, you really should have this enabled in development, if only because it catches problems like infinite loops with usable backtraces.
Troubleshooting
Some notes about setup issues
Command line tools failing mysteriously
This happened in Tiki 27 on Mac Development System With Homebrew but I believe it could apply to any system and any version of Tiki or PHP in theory .
In php8.4 I was getting errors like this from all console.php commands (but it was ok with php8.3, also it was ok with php8.4 in master)
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function Tiki\Command\tr() in [..]/tiki27/lib/core/Tiki/Command/InstallCommand.php:21
It turned out the error actually was "ini_set(): Session ini settings cannot be changed after headers have already been sent" and this had been caused by there being two conf.d/XX-xdebug.ini files in my config so php was emitting "Cannot load Xdebug - it was already loaded" before running the command, and tiki-setup.php was failing on (line 24).
Removing the extra +conf.d/99-xdebug.ini+- file and reloading the shell fixed the issue.
Conclusion: Any output from php before the command executes is likely to cause problems generally, you can check this by doing php -v and you should get:
$ php -v PHP 8.4.19 (cli) (built: Mar 10 2026 15:51:04) (NTS) Copyright (c) The PHP Group [[etc]
not
$ php -v Cannot load Xdebug - it was already loaded PHP 8.4.19 (cli) (built: Mar 10 2026 15:51:04) (NTS) Copyright (c) The PHP Group [[etc]
(update: Fixed in !9782 )