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Artem Tyurin

Node debugging

Recently I spent some time debugging Node while doing Advent of Code 2016.

Two things made my life easier, which I did not use before:

  1. Using Chrome inspector.

Sometimes you need to go deeper than spraying console.log all over the code.

Since version 6.3.0 you can run node --inspect --debug-brk script.js and get full Chrome debugging experience for your Node process out of the box.

Minor inconvenience is that Chrome does not open automatically, you need to copy/paste the link every time. I solved this by installing inspect-process and adding an alias:

alias node-debug='inspect --debug-brk'
  1. Using Restart frame.

Before, I always restarted the whole script to run through the particular part again. But losing state is inconvenient.

Everything changed when I finally found "Restart frame". This action will restore state at the start of the selected call stack item.

Right click stack item
Right click stack item

Additional reading

Debugging Node.js with Chrome DevTools