JSPM

Node Inspector is a debugger interface for nodeJS using the WebKit Web Inspector.

Getting Started

Requirements

• nodeJS
  • versions: 0.1.101 or later
• A WebKit based browser: Chrome, Safari, OmniWeb, etc.

Setup

1. make a debug build of node ./configure --debug make make install

If you get an error like: Build failed: Missing node signature for... try make distclean then try again.

Debugging

There are two ways to use node-inspector. First I'll describe the easy way. As an example lets debug test/hello.js, from the root project directory (node-inspector)

1. start the inspector like this: node bin/inspector.js --start=test/hello.js

   Note: --start path must be relative to the current working directory or absolute

2. open http://127.0.0.1:8080 in your favorite WebKit based browser

   Chrome 5 users MUST use 127.0.0.1 NOT localhost or the browser will not connect to the debugger

3. you should now see the javascript source from nodeJS

4. set some breakpoints, see what happens

This will start a child process node_g --debug test/hello.js and host the inspector interface at http://localhost:8080. The other way is to connect the inspector to an external node process.

1. start a node process: node_g --debug=7878 test/hello.js

2. start the inspector: node bin/inspector.js --debug-port=7878 --web-port=8000

3. open http://127.0.0.1:8000

For more information on getting started see the wiki

Options

    --start=[file]        starts [file] in a child process with node_g --debug
                          [file] path can be absolute or relative to $PWD
    --start-brk=[file]    same as start with --debug-brk
    --web-port=[port]     port to host the inspector (default 8080)
    --debug-port=[port]   v8 debug port to connect to (default 5858)
    --fwd-io              forward stdout and stderr from the child process to inspector console

Extensions

This project started as a Chrome extension. For more info see the wiki.

Cool stuff

• the WebKit Web Inspector debugger is a great js debugger interface, it works just as well for node
• uses a WebSocket to connect to debug-agent, so no polling for breaks
• remote debugging
• javascript top to bottom :)

Known Issues

This is alpha quality code, so use at your own risk:

• be careful about viewing the contents of Buffer objects, each byte is displayed as an individual array element, for anything but tiny Buffers this will take too long to render
• while not stopped at a breakpoint the console doesn't always behave as you might expect
• pause on exceptions doesn't play nice with the node event loop
• closing the inspector does not stop debugging, you must stop inspector.js manually

TODOS

• save application settings
• profiler panel

Thanks

This project respectfully uses code from and thanks the authors of:

• WebKit
• node
• node-websocket-server
• node-paperboy