Debugging jasmine-node tests with node-inspector

Question

Does anyone have any idea if this is possible? Most of the sample for node-inspector seemed geared toward debugging an invoked webpage. I\'d like to be able to debug jasmine

Answer 1

I ended up writing a little util called toggle:

require('tty').setRawMode(true);
var stdin = process.openStdin();

exports.toggle = function(fireThis)
{
    if (process.argv.indexOf("debug")!=-1)
    {
        console.log("debug flag found, press any key to start or rerun. Press 'ctrl-c' to cancel out!");
        stdin.on('keypress', function (chunk, key) {
            if (key.name == 'c' && key.ctrl == true)
            {
                process.exit();
            }
            fireThis();
        });
    }
    else
    {
        console.log("Running, press any key to rerun or ctrl-c to exit.");
        fireThis();
        stdin.on('keypress', function (chunk, key) {
            if (key.name == 'c' && key.ctrl == true)
            {
                process.exit();
            }
            fireThis();
        });



    }
}

You can drop it into your unit tests like:

var toggle = require('./toggle');

toggle.toggle(function(){

    var vows = require('vows'),
    assert = require('assert');

    vows.describe('Redis Mass Data Storage').addBatch({

....

And then run your tests like: node --debug myfile.js debug. If you run debug toggle will wait until you anything but ctrl-c. Ctrl-c exits. You can also rerun, which is nice.

w0000t.

Answer 2

My uneducated guess is that you'd need to patch jasmine, I believe it spawns a new node process or something when running tests, and these new processes would need to be debug-enabled.

I had a similar desire and managed to get expressso working using Eclipse as a debugger: http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/af35b025eb801f43

…but I realised: if I needed to step through my code to understand it, I probably need to refactor the code (probably to be more testable), or break my tests up into smaller units.

Your tests is your debugger.

Answer 3

In short, just debug jasmine-node:

node --debug-brk node_modules/jasmine-node/lib/jasmine-node/cli.js spec/my_spec.js

If you look at the source of the jasmine-node script, it just invokes cli.js, and I found I could debug that script just fine.

I wanted to use node-inspector to debug a CoffeeScript test. Just adding the --coffee switch worked nicely, e.g.

node --debug-brk node_modules/jasmine-node/lib/jasmine-node/cli.js --coffee spec/my_spec.coffee