New Post: Debugging with node-inspector

After long hours of googling and testing I did succeed debugging ClearScript code using node-inspector.

First of all, the latest version (0.12.3) has many extensions for debugging node.js scripts so I used an older version (0.5.0) which has less liability to node.js.

This is advised by the author of node-inspector in the following stackoverflow thread:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22153131/debug-v8-with-node-inspector

I used the following command to install v0.5.0.

npm install node-inspector@0.5.0

You must have node.js (https://nodejs.org/en/) installed on your computer to run this command. Execute it in Node.js command prompt.

It is installed in folder "%USERPROFILE%\node_modules" by default.

I added one line of code to %USERPROFILE%\node_modules\node-inspector\lib\PageAgent.js:

getResourceTree: function(params, done) {

return; //return empty tree

...

This completes the installation.

Here is the guide to debug a javascript file executed by ClearScript:

Open a command prompt and execute the following command:

%USERPROFILE%\node_modules\.bin\node-inspector.cmd

You should see the following lines if node-inspector is running successfully.

Node Inspector v0.5.0
info - socket.io started
Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug?port=5858 to start debugging.

Initialize your V8 engine as in the following code line (VB):

Dim engine As New V8ScriptEngine("global", V8ScriptEngineFlags.EnableDebugging, 9222)

Put a breakpoint right after this line in your code and run your application to reach this breakpoint.

Make sure you have "debugger;" statement in the first line of your JavaScript code.

Open a Chrome browser and navigate to the following address:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug?port=9222

Press "Continue Debugging" button in Vİsual Studio toolbar.

Now you should see your script code stopped at the first "debugger;" line in Chrome browser.

You can continue debugging from here.

Write in this thread if you have any questions.