Ruby Debug for Nova

Connect Nova to the Ruby Debug gem enabling local and remote debugging.

The connection is made possible by the rdbg command. This is why you can consider the extension as the Nova's vscode-rdbg counterpart.

Please be patient if you get into issues or limitations. We are still testing and improving the extension.

Right now not all the settings and features of vscode-rdbg are supported. This is true especially for the remote debugger. The aim in the future is to bring it near to a one to one porting.

Requirements

You need to install latest debug gem and rdbg command should be in $PATH.

$ gem install debug

If you are using ruby 3.1.0 or later the debug gem comes bundled.

Local debugging (launch)

Setup

To start using the local debugger go to Nova's Project Settings and add a new "Ruby Debug" task from the provided template.

Usage

You can configure the debugger as you like in the Project Settings or run it as it is. The default configuration will try to find the rdbg command on your machine and run the current open file in Nova with the ruby command.

If a breakpoint is found, the program execution should pause and the debugger console should appear.

Remote debugging (attach)

Setup

To start using the remote debugger go to Nova's Project Settings and add a new "Ruby Remote Debug" task from the provided template.

Usage

To use the remote debugger make sure you are running the rdbg command with the --open flag. This informs rdbg to listen for connections from the outside.

Right now the only connection method allowed is domainSocket. It means that if at startup the debugger finds a single open socketPath will use that, otherwise you have to specify which one to use.

Specifying the socketPath

Start by generating a socketPath with the rdbg --util=gen-sockpath command. It should print something like:

/var/folders/0y/5cyl_crn3mv0y_gyg734ty2h0000gn/T/ruby-debug-sock-501/ruby-debug-tommaso-71169

Next configure the rdbg command to use the generated socket by specifying --sock-path=SOCK_PATH.

The last step is to tell the remote debugger to use the generated socket. You can do that in the Ruby Remote Debug task settings.

Examples

Ruby on Rails

Allow remote debugging by running rails server under rdbg:

$ rdbg --command --open --nonstop -- rails server

To use the new bin/dev command edit your Procfile.dev accordingly:

web: rdbg --command --open --nonstop -- bin/rails server -p 3000
css: bin/rails tailwindcss:watch

Contributing

You are welcome to contribute to the development!

All you have to do to get up and running is to fork, download and rename the folder from nova-ruby-debug to Ruby Debug.novaextension. After that you should be able to active the project as extension from the Nova's Extensions menu.