What is best way to connect my debugger to my development nodebb?

[David Sargrad]

I've successfully run nodebb in webstorm. At this point I've tried a short list of directives "plugins", "start", "stop", etc.

I've single stepped and have gotten to the point where it forks a new process on start. I've then verified that it successfully starts nodebb in the forked process, and I have a full featured nodebb at that point.

I also noticed that there is a dev option that can be set. I'm not quite sure when that is useful during development. For example I was wondering if that makes attaching to the forked process simpler.

Part of why I want to run in the debugger is because I need to integrate with Keycloak, and would like to use the OAuth plugin for that purpose. Given that integration with Keycloak has not been verified, I wanted to prepare myself for any debug that I might need to do to support reporting my findings.

I also wanted to see if a simple nodebb side change fixes the SocketIO/CORS issue that I've been struggling with.

Anyways, having used forked processes often in the past, I was wondering if you typically will attach to the forked process, or do you use a different means to single step in the forked process.

Also if you do attach, how do you determine the process id to attach to with a node based application?

Lastly, if you can highlight when you typically turn on that debug flag, i'd appreciate it. It seems that when using "dev" the "--no-daemon" option is used that suggests that maybe nodebb is not forked?

Thanks in advance.

[baris]

loader.js is mostly used in production to fork multiple nodebbs, you can probably point your debugger at app.js and start there. In vscode my launch.json looks like this.

{
	// Use IntelliSense to learn about possible attributes.
	// Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes.
	// For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387
	"version": "0.2.0",
	"configurations": [
		{
			"type": "node",
			"request": "launch",
			"name": "NodeBB",
			"skipFiles": [
				"${workspaceFolder}\\node_modules\\**\\*.js",
				"${workspaceFolder}\\src\\promisify.js",
				"<node_internals>/**"
			],
			"program": "${workspaceFolder}\\app.js",
			"runtimeArgs": [
				"--trace-warnings",
				"--stack-trace-limit=200"
			]
		}
	]
}

I modify skipFiles array depending on if I want to step into node_modules like nbb plugins etc.

[David Sargrad]

@baris Cool beans! Ill try it.
Is there a special configuration that you use when you are developing plugins? I'm specifically interested in making some fast progress with that OAuth2 plugin, and a Keycloak integration

[baris]

Nothing special, I use npm link to link the plugins I am working on into the node_modules folder of my nodebb and then use grunt to watch for file changes.

[David Sargrad]

@baris
There is nothing I need to do to activate the plugin? I would think that somehow nodebb must be configured to discover the plugin?

[baris]

After you link the plugin so its in node_modules, you need to activate it either from the ACP or from the CLI with ./nodebb activate nodebb-plugin-my-plugin