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-node tests though.

Answer 1

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 

Answer 2

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.