ruby-debug in 30 seconds (we don't need no stinkin' GUI!)

edit Posted by Chad Woolley on Tuesday January 08, 2008 at 08:30AM

Many people (including me) have complained about the lack of a good GUI debugger for Ruby. Now that some are finally getting usable, I've found I actually prefer IRB-style ruby-debug to a GUI.

There's good tutorial links on the ruby-debug homepage, and a very good Cheat sheet, but I wanted to give a bare-bones HOWTO to help you get immediately productive with ruby-debug.

Install the latest gem

$ gem install ruby-debug

Install the cheatsheet

$ gem install cheat
$ cheat rdebug

Set autolist, autoeval, and autoreload as defaults

$ vi ~/.rdebugrc
set autolist
set autoeval
set autoreload

Run Rails (or other app) via rdebug

$ rdebug script/server

Breakpoint from rdebug

(rdb:1) b app/controllers/my_controller.rb:10

Breakpoint in source

require 'ruby-debug'
debugger
my_buggy_method('foo')

Catchpoint

(rdb:1) cat RuntimeError

Continue to breakpoint

(rdb:1) c

Next Line (Step Over)

(rdb:1) n

Step Into

(rdb:1) s

Continue

(rdb:1) c

Where (Display Frame / Call Stack)

(rdb:1) where

List current line

(rdb:1) l=

Evaluate any var or expression

(rdb:1) myvar.class

Modify a var

(rdb:1) @myvar = 'foo'

Help

(rdb:1) h

There are many other commands, but these are the basics you need to poke around. Check the Cheat sheet for details.

This can also be used directly from any IDE that supports input into a running console (such as Intellij Idea).

That should get you started. So, before you stick in another 'p' to debug, try out ruby-debug instead!

Comments

Brian Takita on January 09, 2008 at 03:09AM

rdebug also pairs very nicely with editors that have an interactive console with links, because the links will take you to where the debug cursor is.

This includes IntelliJ Idea and I believe Eclipse and Netbeans.

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Brian Takita on January 09, 2008 at 03:11AM
Also, a great code snippit for you editor is:
```
require 'ruby-debug'; debugger;
```
I bind it to debug
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Anil Wadghule on January 15, 2008 at 08:58AM

Chad,

I still not get it why do u choose rdebug script/server way, if you choose Brian's snippet, it will just work. Is there any difference in using rdebug and Brian's snippet?

-- Anil

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Vasudev Ram on January 15, 2008 at 04:14PM

Looks useful - thanks!

- Vasudev

Dancing Bison Enterprises Software consulting and training Biz site: http://www.dancingbison.com Blog (on software innovation): http://jugad.livejournal.com Quick and easy PDF creation toolkit: http://www.dancingbison.com/products.html

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Tom on January 15, 2008 at 11:13PM

I am really starting to like using ruby-debug. I find that I use it most often when running my unit and functional tests. The only problem I have is that it doesnt appear to read my defaults from the .rdebugrc file in this scenario. Anyone else seen this behavior?

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Chad Woolley on January 16, 2008 at 04:12AM

@Anil,

I think the primary difference is that when you invoke via rdebug, you don't have to modify your code to set a breakpoint. It will stop on the first line of the script you pass to rdebug, and allow you to set a breakpoint or catchpoint. Sometimes this is more convenient.

Also, I think I've encountered situations where using the gem didn't work as well as rdebug, but I think this was while debugging rubygems itself.

-- Chad

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Chad Woolley on January 16, 2008 at 04:15AM

@Tom,

Yes, I've seen this problem where .rdebugrc is not read. There is a bug on the rdebug tracker. I think it may have been fixed in a recent version, and on previous versions only occurred sometimes (perhaps when using rdebug vs. debugger call in the code).

If it isn't working for me, I just manually issue 'set autoeval' and 'set autolist'.

-- Chad

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Chad Woolley on January 16, 2008 at 04:23AM

Interesting Anecdote: Today, I was with a customer trying to debug cruisecontrol.rb. He uses NetBeans (which was the GUI debugger I referred to above that was pretty nice). However, we couldn't get the debugger to breakpoint after a couple of minutes trying, so we used ruby-debug, which worked fine.

In my totally biased and unscientific experience, ruby GUI debuggers seem to have problems with code that issues system calls (backticks, system(), IO.popen, etc). ruby-debug seems to handle this stuff better.

-- Chad

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Jacqui on January 17, 2008 at 03:38PM
@Tom - and anyone else who experienced ruby-debugger not reading your .rdebugrc file in Rails:

The same thing happened to me. I found that in order to get my default settings applied for ruby-debugger, I had to include the following in my environment file - I only include it locally, for development, in a file that is included, fwiw:
```
<code>
require 'rubygems'
require 'ruby-debug'
Debugger.start

Debugger.settings[:autoeval] = true
Debugger.settings[:autolist] = true
Debugger.settings[:autoreload] = true
</code>
```
hth, jacqui
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Ed Ruder on January 25, 2008 at 11:43PM
I got an error on the Debugger.settings[:autoreload] = true line, using ruby-debug-0.9.3. Changing this line to:
```
Debugger.settings[:reload_source_on_change] = true
```
Got it to work! (Gleaned from the bottom of the ruby-debug-0.9.3/cli/ruby-debug/command.rb file.)

Ed
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Ed Ruder on January 25, 2008 at 11:45PM
Sorry about the formatting in the post above. To clarify, I changed this:
```
Debugger.settings[:autoreload] = true
```
To this:
```
Debugger.settings[:reload_source_on_change] = true
```
Ed
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Jacqui on March 01, 2008 at 08:02PM

Ed, just saw your comments. Weird, I wonder why that works for me but not for you. This is in a Rails 1.2.5 app using rdebug v0.10.0.

Perhaps we're just on different versions of something. Glad you got it working, though.

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