How to use gdb python debugging extension inside virtualenv

Question

I\'m running ubuntu, and installed the python-dbg package. When trying to use the installed version directly everything works great:

$ gdb python2.7-dbg
GNU          


        

Answer 1

In Debian 11 with Python 3.7, gdb debugging works out of the box inside virtualenv.

Make sure that you created the venv with the same Python3 version than the python3-dbg package version installed.

In case symbols don't load correctly, rebuild the venv from scratch and try again.

Answer 2

I've solved the problem by using strace on gdb, grepping the "open" syscalls.

It seems that gdb makes a search for python-gdb.py in several paths it guesses (according to the python binary), and whenever the file is not found it just fails silently.

Eventually the way to solve the problem is to link /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/python2.7-gdb.py into the env's bin directory. The name of the link should be <python binary name>-gdb.py, being in my case python2.7-dbg-gdb.py (...).

After that, everything seems to work.

Answer 3

@itai's answer only partially worked for me on Ubuntu Trusty (14.04). I found a couple of other things worked better:

sudo apt-get install python2.7-dbg

then, in the virtualenv:

. bin/activate
mkdir bin/.debug
ln -s /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/python2.7-gdb.py bin/.debug/python-gdb.py
ln -s /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/python2.7 bin/.debug/

gdb --args bin/python2.7 ...

This helped gdb find the python debugging symbols as well as the py-bt etc commands.

Answer 4

On Ubuntu 12.04, @craigds's answer was very helpful but didn't get me quite all the way there: I was still running into:

IOError: invalid Python installation: unable to open /path/to/venv/lib/python2.7/config_d/Makefile (No such file or directory)

Fixed that, then I ran into:

IOError: invalid Python installation: unable to open /path/to/venv/local/include/python2.7_d/pyconfig.h (No such file or directory)

So the full steps for me to fix up my virtualenv were:

source /path/to/venv/bin/activate
mkdir /path/to/venv/bin/.debug
ln -s /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/python2.7-gdb.py /path/to/venv/bin/.debug/python-gdb.py
ln -s /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/python2.7 /path/to/venv/bin/.debug/
ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/config_d/ /path/to/venv/lib/python2.7/config_d
ln -s /usr/include/python2.7_d/ /path/to/venv/local/include/python2.7_d
ln -s /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/python2.7-gdb.py /path/to/venv/bin/python-gdb.py