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.

Also, a great code snippit for you editor is:

require 'ruby-debug'; debugger;

I bind it to debug

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

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

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?

@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

@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

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

@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

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

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

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.

Debugger.settings[:autolist] = true

doesn't work, has to be:

Debugger.settings[:autolist] = 1