Simon Willison’s Weblog

Fun with TextMate and PDB. TextMate bookmarks (against lines in a file) are stored as OS X extended attributes, which can be accessed from Python using the xattr module. Here’s a clever piece of code that uses bookmarks to set breakpoints in the command-line pdb debugger.

# 23rd March 2010, 9:48 am / debugging, osx, pdb, python, textmate, xattr

Debugging in Python. The missing manual for Python’s powerful pdb debugger.

# 18th November 2009, 12:34 pm / debugger, debugging, pdb, python

pudb. A full-screen, curses console based visual debugger for Python, built using the urwid console UI library.

# 1st November 2009, 12:09 pm / console, debugger, pdb, pudb, python, ui, urwid

Announcing django-viewtools. A really excellent idea—run ./manage.py viewtools --pdb /path/on/site/ to debug a view in your Django project that is raising an error using the Python debugger, or use --profile to run the full request cycle for that URL through the profiler.

# 17th February 2009, 9:35 pm / debugging, django, djangoviewtools, eric-moritz, pdb, profiler, python

modswgi: Debugging Techniques. mod_wsgi is excellent software, and the documentation is equally superb. I used these instructions recently to run the Python debugger inside a running instance of Apache, which helped my track down some import errors that weren’t occurring with Django’s development server.

# 25th May 2008, 1:34 pm / debugging, django, modwsgi, pdb, python

The joy of pdb.set_trace(). I use nosetests --pdb-failures as my main entrypoint for Python debugging—it starts the debugger at the first failing test.

# 25th April 2007, 11:37 pm / debugging, nose, pdb, python, testing