purplejacket/ruby-debug-passenger

Adds a 'rake debug' task to Rails to restart Phusion Passenger with a debugger connected

ruby-debug-passenger

Background

I wanted to use Phusion Passenger as an Apache module (not standalone) but still be able to use the interactive Ruby debugger.

Thanks to Adam Meehan I was able to do that, and I decided to make it into a reusable Gem.

Requirements

This is been tested on:

• Rails 3.2.2
• Ruby (MRI) 1.9.2
• Old Ruby Debugger 0.11.6
• Phusion Passenger 3.0.11

and

• Rails 3.0.14
• Ruby (MRI) 1.9.3-p125
• Debugger gem 1.1.4
• Phusion Passenger 3.0.12 and 3.0.13

It will probably work on other versions, but not on Rails 2.

It may or may not work on Ruby 1.8.

Installation

Add this to your Gemfile (assuming you are on Ruby 1.9):

gem "debugger"
gem "ruby-debug-passenger"

or use the old ruby-debug gem:

gem "ruby-debug19", require: "ruby-debug"
gem "ruby-debug-passenger"

Or if you're using Ruby 1.8 you can try the following, but it hasn't been tested!

gem "ruby-debug"
gem "ruby-debug-passenger"

Then run bundle install to install it.

Usage

Add debugger anywhere in your Ruby code that you want to invoke the debugger. (Or in an ERB template add <% debugger %>.)

Run rake debug to restart Phusion Passenger and connect to the debugger. (You will be prompted to reload the app in your browser.)

Suggested configuration

I recommend putting this in your ~/.rdebugrc:

set autolist
set autoeval
set autoreload

Recommended reading

• ruby-debug documentation
• RailsCast #54 (the setup steps are out of date, but it shows why ruby-debug can be useful)

License

MIT License - see LICENSE.txt.