How to debug a Gruntfile with breakpoints using node-inspector?
- by Kris Hollenbeck
So I have spent the past couple days trying to get this to work with no luck. Most of the solutions I have found seem to work "okay" for debugging node applications. But I haven't had much luck debugging grunt stand alone. I would like to be able to set breakpoints in my gruntfile and either step through the code with either the browser or an IDE.
I have tried the following:
Debugging using intelliJ IDE Using Grunt Console (Process finished with exit code 6)
Debugging with Nodeeclipse (This sort of works okay but doesn't hit the breakpoints set in eclipse, not very intuitive)
Debugging using node-inspector (This one also sort of works. I can step through a little ways using F11 and F10 in chrome. But eventually it just crashes. Using F8 to skip to break point never works.)
ERROR MESSAGE USING NODE-INSPECTOR
So currently node-inspector feels like it has gotten me the closest to what I want. To get here I did the following:
From my grunt directory I ran the following commands:
grunt node-inspector
node --debug-brk Gruntfile.js
And then from there I went to localhost:8080/debug?port=5858 to debug my Gruntfile.js. But like I mentioned above, as soon as I hit F8 to skip to breakpoint it crashes with the above error. Has anybody had any success using this method to try to debug a Gruntfile? So far from my search efforts I have not found a very well documented way of doing this. So hopefully this will be useful or beneficial information for future users. Also I am using Windows 7 by the way. Thanks in advance.
