How to restart Node application from Chrome Devtool

Question

All:

I wonder How to signal Node debugger(Node ver: 8.9.4) to rerun the code from Chrome DevTool?

The way I use it is:

1. node --inspect-brk app.js
2. Open chrome://inspect/
3. Click the link shown under Remote Target
4. Debug in pop up console.

If I want to run the app again to back to same breakpoint, currently I have to close the devtool, and repeat step 1-4, I wonder is there anyway I can directly reload and run app.js again in devtool console(just like if you run node inspect app.js you can use restart to reload and run)?

Answer 1

Maybe you can restart the script doing the following steps:

As you can see the app is running and we have values inside the totalOrders variable:

Right click the (annonymous) at the Call Stack, and click "Restart frame":

The script has restarted and the variable is undefined again:

I hope this answer will help someone.

Answer 2

On Chromium 85, Ubuntu 21.10, node.js 14.17.0, after I click on DevTools "Open dedicated DevTools for node", the popup window automatically reconnects whenever I restart the program.

So if I want to restart the program, I can:

• Alt + Tab to go to terminal
• Ctrl + C to kill the program
• Up to go up history to re-run the command
• Re-run the node --inspect-brk app.js command
• Alt + Tab to go back to the dedicated DevTools window

and after this the debugging process will have restarted from the beginning, with all breakpoints kept.

It is not as ideal as a button on the UI, but at least you don't have to click links on the web UI with the mouse which would be the most painful part.