ti-debuggerr
Advanced tools
Titanium Debugger is a debugger interface for Node.js applications that uses the Blink Developer Tools (formerly WebKit Web Inspector).
Since version 6.3, Node.js provides a built-in DevTools-based debugger which mostly deprecates Titanium Debugger, see e.g. this blog post to get started. The built-in debugger is developed directly by the V8/Chromium team and provides certain advanced features (e.g. long/async stack traces) that are too difficult to implement in Titanium Debugger.
$ npm install -g node-inspector
$ node-debug app.js
where app.js is the name of your main Node application JavaScript file.
See available configuration options here
The node-debug command will load Titanium Debugger in your default browser.
NOTE: Titanium Debugger works in Chrome and Opera only. You have to re-open the inspector page in one of those browsers if another browser is your default web browser (e.g. Safari or Internet Explorer).
Titanium Debugger works almost exactly as the Chrome Developer Tools. Read the excellent DevTools overview to get started.
Other useful resources:
The Blink DevTools debugger is a powerful JavaScript debugger interface. Titanium Debugger supports almost all of the debugging features of DevTools, including:
The debugged process must be started with --debug-brk, this way the script is paused on the first line.
Note: node-debug adds this option for you by default.
When in doubt, refresh the page in browser
Yes. Titanium Debugger must be running on the same machine, but your browser can be anywhere. Just make sure port 8080 is accessible.
And if Titanium Debugger is not running on your remote machine, you can also debug it as long as your local machine can connect it.
In this way, you must launch Titanium Debugger with --no-inject which means some features are not supported such as profiling and consoling output inspection.
So how to debug remote machine with your local Titanium Debugger?
$ node-inspector --debug-host 192.168.0.2 --no-inject then open the url http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug?port=5858
$ node-inspector --no-inject then specify the remote machine address as a host parameter in the url e.g.) http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug?host=192.168.123.12&port=5858
Create a JSON-encoded array. You must escape quote characters when using a command-line option.
$ node-inspector --hidden='["node_modules/framework"]'
Note that the array items are interpreted as regular expressions.
Make sure that you have adblock disabled as well as any other content blocking scripts and plugins.
You may want to delete debug session metadata if for example Titanium Debugger gets in a bad state with some watch variables that were function calls (possibly into some special c-bindings). In such cases, even restarting the application/debug session may not fix the problem.
Titanium Debugger stores debug session metadata in the HTML5 local storage. You can inspect the contents of local storage and remove any items as needed. In Google Chrome, you can execute any of the following in the JavaScript console:
// Remove all
window.localStorage.clear()
// Or, to list keys so you can selectively remove them with removeItem()
window.localStorage
// Remove all the watch expressions
window.localStorage.removeItem('watchExpressions')
// Remove all the breakpoints
window.localStorage.removeItem('breakpoints')
When you are done cleaning up, hit refresh in the browser.
Try setting --no-preload to true. This option disables searching disk for *.js at startup. Code will still be loaded into Titanium Debugger at runtime, as modules are required.
You have to start _mocha as the debugged process and make sure
the execution pauses on the first line. This way you have enough
time to set your breakpoints before the tests are run.
$ node-debug _mocha
If you are running on a Unix system you can simply run the following command.
The $(which ..) statement gets replaced with the full path to the gulp-cli.
$ node-debug $(which gulp) task
If you are running on Windows, you have to get the full path of gulp.js
to make an equivalent command:
> node-debug %appdata%\npm\node_modules\gulp\bin\gulp.js task
You can omit the task part to run the default task.
While running node-debug is a convenient way to start your debugging
session, there may come time when you need to tweak the default setup.
There are three steps needed to get you up and debugging:
$ node-inspector
You can leave the server running in background, it's possible to debug multiple processes using the same server instance.
You can either start Node with a debug flag like:
$ node --debug your/node/program.js
or, to pause your script on the first line:
$ node --debug-brk your/short/node/script.js
Or you can enable debugging on a node that is already running by sending it a signal:
Get the PID of the node process using your favorite method.
pgrep or ps -ef are good
$ pgrep -l node
2345 node your/node/server.js
Send it the USR1 signal
$ kill -s USR1 2345
Windows does not support UNIX signals. To enable debugging, you can use
an undocumented API function process._debugProcess(pid):
Get the PID of the node process using your favorite method, e.g.
> tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq node.exe"
Image Name PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage
========================= ======== ================ =========== ============
node.exe 3084 Console 1 11,964 K
Call the API:
> node -e "process._debugProcess(3084)"
Open http://127.0.0.1:8080/?port=5858 in the Chrome browser.
Both node-inspector and node-debug use rc module
to manage configuration options.
Places for configuration:
node-inspector_--config file then from that file.node-inspectorrc or the first found looking in ./ ../ ../../ ../../../ etc.$HOME/.node-inspectorrc$HOME/.node-inspector/config$HOME/.config/node-inspector$HOME/.config/node-inspector/config/etc/node-inspectorrc/etc/node-inspector/configAll configuration sources that where found will be flattened into one object, so that sources earlier in this list override later ones.
| Option | Alias | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| general | |||
| --help | -h | Display information about available options. Use --help -l to display full usage info.Use --help <option> to display quick help on option. | |
| --version | -v | Display Titanium Debugger's version. | |
| --debug-port | -d | 5858 | Node/V8 debugger port. ( node --debug={port}) |
| --web-host | 0.0.0.0 | Host to listen on for Titanium Debugger's web interface.node-debug listens on 127.0.0.1 by default. | |
| --web-port | -p | 8080 | Port to listen on for Titanium Debugger's web interface. |
| node-debug | |||
| --debug-brk | -b | true | Break on the first line. ( node --debug-brk) |
| --nodejs | [] | Pass NodeJS options to debugged process. ( node --option={value}) | |
| --script | [] | Pass options to debugged process. ( node app --option={value}) | |
| --cli | -c | false | CLI mode, do not open browser. |
| node-inspector | |||
| --save-live-edit | false | Save live edit changes to disk (update the edited files). | |
| --preload | true | Preload *.js files. You can disable this option to speed up the startup. | |
| --inject | true | Enable injection of debugger extensions into the debugged process. It's possible disable only part of injections using subkeys --no-inject.network. Allowed keys : network, profiles, console. | |
| --hidden | [] | Array of files to hide from the UI, breakpoints in these files will be ignored. All paths are interpreted as regular expressions. | |
| --stack-trace-limit | 50 | Number of stack frames to show on a breakpoint. | |
| --ssl-key | Path to file containing a valid SSL key. | ||
| --ssl-cert | Path to file containing a valid SSL certificate. |
$ node-debug [general-options] [node-debug-options] [node-inspector-options] [script]
$ node-inspector [general-options] [node-inspector-options]
Display full usage info:
$ node-debug --help -l
Set debug port of debugging process to 5859:
$ node-debug -p 5859 app
Pass --web-host=127.0.0.2 to node-inspector. Start node-inspector to listen on 127.0.0.2:
$ node-debug --web-host 127.0.0.2 app
Pass --option=value to debugging process:
$ node-debug app --option value
Start node-inspector to listen on HTTPS:
$ node-debug --ssl-key ./ssl/key.pem --ssl-cert ./ssl/cert.pem app
Ignore breakpoints in files stored in node_modules folder or ending in .test.js:
$ node-debug --hidden node_modules/ --hidden \.test\.js$ app
Add --harmony flag to the node process running the debugged script:
$ node-debug --nodejs --harmony app
Disable preloading of .js files:
$ node-debug --no-preload app
Use dashed option names in RC files. Sample config file (to be saved as .node-inspectorrc):
{
"web-port": 8088,
"web-host": "0.0.0.0",
"debug-port": 5858,
"save-live-edit": true,
"preload": false,
"hidden": ["\.test\.js$", "node_modules/"],
"nodejs": ["--harmony"],
"stack-trace-limit": 50,
"ssl-key": "./ssl/key.pem",
"ssl-cert": "./ssl/cert.pem"
}
Making Titanium Debugger the best debugger for node.js cannot be achieved without the help of the community. The following resources should help you to get started.
Big thanks to the many contributors to the project, see Contributors on GitHub
FAQs
Stand-alone Titanium Debugger (based node-inspector)
We found that ti-debuggerr demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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