How To Disable Xdebug with PHP 7 CLI Ubuntu

If you are running PHP 7 with Xdebug, or like me, use Laravel Homestead, you might have seen this error message:

You are running composer with xdebug enabled. This has a major impact on runtime performance. See https://getcomposer.org/xdebug

And Composer will take an age to do anything.

To fix this, prior to PHP 7 people would suggest to comment out the extension from your php.ini file. However, in PHP 7 they are no longer in there.

Instead, we use the phpdismod command.

$ sudo phpdismod -s cli xdebug

The -s flag tells it to disable Xdebug for the CLI SAPI (/etc/php/7.0/cli) and not FPM.

And just like that, the warning message should be gone. No need to restart PHP.