JetBrain's Remote Debugging Setup is the Bane of My Existence!!!

So I've tried for the last few hours (add that to the days I have spent previously) trying to get the remote debugger working. I've finally gotten it working, here are the last perhaps 1 hr. of working and how I finally got it to do something right...but it really, really, really shouldn't be this hard. :-(

1. Have a DigitalOcean Ubuntu Droplet running Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Xdebug
2. I finally decided to use SSH tunneling to try and get as many variables besides PhpStorm and the remote droplet out of the way.
3. I was still having issues so I installed artbek's Chrome Xdebug extension and was able to successfully connect to the remote server's Xdebug.
4. I've finally gotten PhpStorm at least talking to Xdebug but now we come to the debugging issue.
5. I have Xdebug Helper installed in my Chrome browser as well, and I set that to debug.
6. In PhpStorm I click on Start Listening for PHP Debug Connections.
7. Back in my browser I refresh my remote server page and the Incoming Connection From Xdebug message appears.
8. If I try Importing mappings from deployment it complains that "No suitable deployment configurations was found"
9. So I switch the radio button to "Manually choose local file or project". (See image 1 below)
10. As one can see the file path being requested is /var/www/html/index.php, so I'm going choose C:\VersionControl\wordpress-4.9.2\wordpress\index.php, Ready to debug? Nope, the PhpStorm event log shows the following:
11. "Debug session was finished without being paused
    It may be caused by path mappings misconfiguration or not synchronized local and remote projects.
    To figure out the problem check path mappings configuration for 'test.liquidchurch.com' server at PHP|Servers or enable Break at first line in PHP scripts option (from Run menu)." (See Image 2)
12. So lets take a look at my server mappings, as we can see the project files path is not mapped, so I add that mapping. (See image 3)
13. I again refresh the page in my browser and again am greeted with the message outlined in 11 above (see image 2).
14. I proceed to add breakpoints at several points throughout my project code and refresh the page again...and it works.

I have experienced the exact same problems, and sentiment, as the author of this post. I was able to (finally) get this working after many hours and countless times seeing the message “debug session was finished without being paused”.

I’m writing this response to help anyone who may have stumbled upon this post during (one of many) frantic and angry google sessions as I did. It IS possible to get this working.

CONFIGURATION
(my dev environment is Laravel Homestead running on virtualbox - although that fact is not necessarily specific to this problem)

First of all refer to this page as your main guide through this problem. Let’s refer to this as “The Guide”.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/troubleshooting-php-debugging.html

Secondly, know that debugging from the command line is set up differently than via a browser. For CLI debugging read here:
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/debugging-a-php-cli-script.html

Note: An important point that “The Guide” doesn’t cover is configuring the specific xdebug settings.
You can find info about configuring these here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27936323/debugging-laravel-artisan-from-phpstorm-with-homestead

And a list of all the settings here:
https://xdebug.org/docs/all_settings

One notable difference here between Web and CLI configurations is you want xdebug.remote_autostart=true on CLI because CLI debugging session cannot start with a header variable like web does.

If you’re as angry as I was, you might be thinking “hey thanks for the sweet info but WHERE TF do I set these up?”. Well, in my VM (laravel homestead as I mentioned) which is Ubuntu 18.04 running nginx you’ll find the php.ini files here:

CLI: /etc/php/7.4/cli/php.ini
Web: /etc/php/7.4/fpm/php.ini

Personally, I set the xdebug config at the very end of the file.

I also set up a debug profile for both CLI and Web, that listen for a specific key.

One note about Laravel CLI specifically, sometimes I like to set a breakpoint in the artisan file at the end before it terminates. You can then use the console window of PHPStorm similarly to how you use tinker -- except this way you get autocomplete and can view the content of the variables in the debugger.

MAPPING
Lastly, the thing that drove me the most insane was the session not being paused, never finding the breakpoints, and leaving you with the single option of breaking on the first line. If in the debug console you see it say “connected” while your page loads but it never breaks and/or you just get the hated ‘session did not pause’ message. You probably have a mapping issue.

One might think that if you’ve got your ssh connection set up the IDE could detect the mapping for you, OR if you map the project folder all of the files & directories within could be determined by the IDE, but in my experience this doesn’t happen.

You have to manually map each file for the IDE to break on the breakpoints within.
Tip: if you have breakpoints that are being missed put the function xdebug_break() next to them. When the IDE breaks there there will likely be a message saying that that file is incorrectly mapped, at which time you can correct it.

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I hope this helps save people time!