Debugging Node.js with Chrome DevTools
Support for Node.js debuggability landed in Node.js in 2016. Here’s how to get up and running. (Post updated Jan 2018)
1. Download and install the current version of node. (v6.3.0+ required)
2. Run node with the --inspect-brk flag:
# Break on the first statement of the script▸ node --inspect-brk index.js
Next, you used to open the big chrome-devtools:// URL it spits out, but don’t. Now there’s a better way…
3. Open about:inspect in Chrome
It’ll redirect you to chrome://inspect quickly and you’ll see something like:
4. Click the Open dedicated DevTools for Node link.
You’ll get a popup window for debugging your node session.
But better than that, when you kill and restart node, the window will automatically reconnect to it. 🔁🔁💥
(Btw: the inspect link beneath the specific target will only apply for that session of node and won’t reconnect.)
In DevTools, now connected to Node, you’ll have all the Chrome DevTools features you’re used to:
- Complete breakpoint debugging, stepping w/ blackboxing
- Source maps for transpiled code
- LiveEdit: JavaScript hot-swap evaluation w/ V8
- Console evaluation with ES6 feature/object support and custom object formatting
- Sampling JavaScript profiler w/ flamechart
- Heap snapshot inspection, heap allocation timeline, allocation profiling
- Asynchronous stacks for native promises
To see this in action, here’s my demo during the 2017 Node Summit:
Lastly, there is now official documentation on debugging Node with the new protocol: https://nodejs.org/en/docs/inspector/
