"Independent" Python Debugger (local/remote client-server & UI agnostic), based on bdb and multiprocessing (Python Standard Library).
Originally, this module was named qdb, due it uses queues (via pipes) internally for RPC, using the pdb extension facilities.
The initial main motivation was to decuople the Pdb user interface from the low-level Python Debugger framework (Bdb), providing a simple communication mechanism in order to implement several frontends (visual IDEs, online web IDEs, etc.).
Already, this project is used in:
- web2py (integrated to official admin app)
- rad2py (wxPython IDE in development)
Others attemps include GEdit plugins, and IPython plugins could be comming soon. Standalone version can be run from the console (like pdb).
Then start the interactive debugging console:
python3 -m dbg
To start a debug session for debuggee.py:
python3 -m dbg debuggee.py
Also, you could use the traditional set_trace fuction (like in PDB) as a shortcut to start the debugger and stop in the following line:
import dbg; dbg.set_trace()Alternatively, to start to debug from inside a running program just do:
import dbg; dbg.debug()Note that debug connects to the debugger but doesn't stop immediately (it is designed to be used with visual frontends that set breakpoints at startup).
The "server" frontend (debugger) uses multiprocessing.connection.Listener and the client "backend" (debuggee) uses multiprocessing.connection.Client.
This allows for a single frontend to host multiple debugging sessions (multithreading and multiprocessing could be supported).
Python2 and Python3 compatibility is archived using Pickle 2 standard protocol, so you can debug a py3k app from a py2 IDE. No dependencies are need.
Per default, it listens on port 6000 (TCP), but that can be configured via environments variables or parameters (host, port, authkey)