I really appreciate all the help, but that did not work either
I changed the port then restarted the site then clicked from the bug icon again in phpstorm and nothing I also changed the listening port in php storm
I don’t want to give up on local, but without xdebug i have to go back to using echo statements and get a much worse experience, i was so excited by local and i really want to make it work, I have no idea what could be going on. Like I said I was able to get xdebug working in MAMP but it just refuses to work with local
I appreciate your patience!
I’m still looking into other possible solutions.
Have you tried restarting the Local Machine and/or your computer? There may be a virtual networking issue at play here.
I have restarted everything several times over, the site, the computer, the local machine, etc… I have read everything I can find. Like I said I was just able to get it to work perfectly with MAMP on my machine, i have tried the autostart setting in xdebug, I noticed that in some of the material some were not able to get it to work unitl they set the remote host to the correct ip, im not sure what ip my local site is at so I am not able to try it. Could ir be something in virtual box?
I got it!!! I’m not sure what I actually did that worked but I believe it was turning off windows defender firewall. I’m sure there is a rule I can set somehow so I don’t have to completely turn it off, but I turned everything off then rebooted the machine. I also had set the remote host to the local domain in php.ini, though i don’t know if I needed to do that, i also set the port to 9123 which I saw in a forum somewhere, I also don’t know if I needed to do that. However it is now working.
This now brings me back to my original reason for posing which is the configure phpstorm button is not working in local. It worked for the very first site i made but after that it does nothing. I see in the original site i made that it created some config files for phpstorm, This is not happening with new custom sites. I can probably configure everything manually but it would be nice if that function worked. Also, thank you so much for your time and your help!
Rock on, glad to hear you got it sorted out! Thanks for sharing the solution too 
Regarding the Xdebug configure button not working, can you try clicking the button and then provide the local-by-flywheel.log file? See “How do I retrieve Local’s log file?” for instructions on how to get that file.
I pressed the button several times, there doesn’t appear to be any corresponding info in the log about it though, it seems this
May 16, 2018, 4:42 PM EDT - info: [main/waitForMySQL] Querying MySQL
corresponds to when i click the button, then it does nothing