Does someone used node-inspector with Grunt for application debugging? If not, Can you recommend a debugging tool for Grunt based apps?
I'm working with nodejs for a server side app and I have Grunt to use separated tasks (this is because users can execute tasks separately).
Windows solution
Run
from cmd in the directory with your
Gruntfile.js
. Do not forget to putdebugger;
line in necessary places.I recently created grunt-node-inspector to easily configure node-inspector with the rest of your grunt workflow, check it out: https://github.com/ChrisWren/grunt-node-inspector
Here is a section of a Gruntfile which illustrates how you can debug a grunt task using grunt-node-inspector, grunt-concurrent, and grunt-shell: https://github.com/CabinJS/Cabin/blob/master/Gruntfile.js#L44-L77
Great answers here. In 2017, now you can do
node --inspect --debug-brk $(which grunt) taskName
Which prints something like.
To start debugging, open the following URL in Chrome: chrome-devtools://devtools/bundled/inspector.html?experiments=true&v8only=true&ws=127.0.0.1:9229/232652c3-f63c-4b00-8de9-17dfad5db471
Open that URL in chrome, and you're good to go!
I'm using Node 7.3.0 and I'm on Mac. You might have to follow some of the advice in other posts to get it going on Windows.
To debug, we have to modify the grunt file under bin. On my machine, grunt is installed globally, so I went to /usr/local/lib/node_modules/grunt/bin I opened the file and modified:
#!/usr/bin/env node
To
#!/usr/bin/env node --debug-brk
--debug-brk will break on the first line of javascript ran.
Doing that alone isn't quite enough though, since you won't be able to find you're grunt task js file in the drop down in node inspector, so you have to modify the file you're interested in debugging by adding
debugger;
where you want the breakpoint to happen. Now you can click continue after the first break, and you'll break on you'redebugger;
linePretty kludgy, but it's the only way I've found so far.
I have done a task to run my app and launch node-inspector. It is far better than current proposition, you just have to add this task in gruntfile:
To run grunt in debug, you need to pass the grunt script to node explicitly:
and put a
debugger;
line in your task.node-inspector
will then open a browser with debugging tools.Edit 28 Feb 2014
node-inspector
has added the commandnode-debug
, which launches node in a--debug
state and opens the browser to thenode-inspector
page, stopping when it hits the firstdebugger
line or set breakpoint.Edit 30 January 2015
On Windows, things are a touch more complicated. See the answer from @e.gluhotorenko for instructions.