Easy Node Debugging

Today's comic is just silly. A frog's debugger is his tongue, since it is a very effective tool for removing bugs. Or maybe it just relocates them - directly to the frog's stomach. If you want to use a debugger with your Node.js applications, you'll want something better than a tongue.

I will admit that I was slow to adopt the use of a debugger for runtime code inspection. Early on in my software development career, when a program wasn't working the way I thought that it should, I just put in some code to print stuff to the console and restarted. That's when my applications were small and didn't take long to recompile and restart. By 2003, I was working on large Java EE systems where the process of rebuilding and redeploying took too long for System.out.println(...) to be an acceptable method for finding bugs. I actually got pretty good with the Java command-line debugger, but after seeing the Java debugger in the Eclipse IDE I gave up Emacs as my primary development environment and switched. I have no regrets.

Today I also do a lot of JavaScript development for Node in addition to my work with Java, but have been so far unimpressed with the debugging capabilities for Node integrated into Eclipse. I use Nodeclipse and for development purposes I am fairly happy, but the debugger left me wanting something else.

I believe I found it with Node Inspector. The idea behind it is pretty cool - debug your JavaScript applications with the JavaScript debugger with which you are probably most familiar: the Chrome Dev Tools!

Here's how it works. first install Node Inspector as a global module.

$ npm install -g node-inspector

Then instead of launching your Node app the "normal" way, do this instead:

$ node-debug app.js

As long as Chrome is your default browser (come on, why shouldn't it be?), the debugger window will launch as a new browser tab which will look like the Developer Tools window. Awesome!

Node Inspector debugging one of my demo apps. Using the Chrome Dev Tools in Chrome!

There are a few things to note here. First, you'll want to be using a version of node greater than or equal to v0.11.13. Older versions work but the debugging capabilities are limited. Second, since the debugger is also running in the browser, if you are debugging a web app you might find yourself needing to switch tabs all the time. You can pop the tab out into a separate window, but it's still a third thing you need to deal with in addition to your IDE and the application you are testing. Not a huge problem, but it is something to consider. Maybe it's enough to make you finally add that third monitor to your development workstation...

Or if you want to get rid of bugs the old-fashioned way, try a frog.

Amphibian.com comic for 1 June 2015