Debugging/printing in a Hubot script

Question

I'm trying to debug an existing Hubot script and in the future write my own, and I need an easy way to debug it or at least print values somewhere (but not to the channel). How can I do so?

Bonus points if this can be done with just using Node in some interactive local mode. I'm really not sure where to start.

All scripts Hubot uses are written in Coffeescript.

P.S. I'm using Hubot with Hipchat.

Answer 1

I don't know if this helps but I found a way to inspect objects.

Util = require "util"

module.exports = (robot) ->
  robot.hear /hi robot/i, (msg) ->
    user = robot.brain.usersForFuzzyName(msg.message.user.name)
    msg.send "#{Util.inspect(user)}"

This allowed be to see all the elements of the object so I could figure out what I was doing wrong...

Answer 2

I have discovered the answer myself: console.log MSG in a .coffee Coffeescript source does exactly what I needed.