Question

76

What's the right way to enable the node debugger with mocha's --debug-brk switch?

rated 0 times [ 81] [ 5] / answers: 1 / hits: 53525 / 12 Years ago, wed, january 16, 2013, 12:00:00

I have some debugger statements in my module under test and want to run mocha with --debug-brk set and hit my breakpoint so that I can inspect the state of my module. Unfortunately, whenever I run mocha with this option, I end up with a blank cursor on the next line. I can enter text, but there's nothing that appears to be processing my commands (it certainly doesn't look like the node debugger):

$ mocha --debug-brk tests.js -R spec

debugger listening on port 5858

[BLANK CURSOR]

Am I doing something wrong with how I'm launching mocha?

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felixa

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3 Years ago

answered 12 Years ago estefanib · Accepted Answer

To answer the original question, even though I also suggest you look into node-inspector: you can use the CLI debugger built into node through mocha with the debug option, instead of the --debug or --debug-brk flags. (Notice the lack of dashes.)

In your example, instead, it would be:

$ mocha debug tests.js -R spec

debugger listening on port 5858

connecting... ok

break in node_modules/mocha/bin/_mocha:7

  5  */

  6 

  7 var program = require('commander')

  8   , sprintf = require('util').format

  9   , path = require('path')

debug> [CURSOR]

Again, debug as above in bold, with no dashes. (=

Relevant: https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha/issues/247