Debugging r00lz. Maybe you’re trying to find an elusive bug or how that spaghetti piece of code works, in any case is a quite powerful tool and you should add it to your day to day job.

Debugging in ruby is easy… and you don’t even need a GUI for it! Ruby has the amazing ruby-debug gem. That gem provides an executable to debug your ruby software. There’re versions for ruby 1.8.x and ruby 1.9.x. I will explain here how to install and use the version for ruby 1.8, but ruby 1.9 version is quite similar.

First install the gem with gem install ruby-debug. This will give you an executable called rdebug which executes the ruby interpreter in debug mode allowing you to debug your script.

I will use this small script to debug.

Now we can just run the debugger with rdebug small_script.rb. And… voila!

Here you can see the debugger.

Here’s the file in which you’ve stopped: [-4, 5] in /projects/889122/small_script.rb

This arrow indicates that you’re stopped there: => 1 dude = true

And this is the rdebug console where you can give commands to the debugger.: (rdb:1) _

Let’s give it a quick try to see how the commands work. Type help and press enter.

As you can see there’re plenty of commands in the debugger, those ones you will use them a lot.

  • next (you can use it shortened as n as well) will make the script go one step forward.
  • continue (shortened as c) will make the script continue until it finds a breakpoint.
  • step (shortened as s) will step into a method.
  • break (shortened as b) sets a breakpoint with the format b file_name.rb:XX where XX is the line number.

For everything else… I encourage you to spend 15 minutes reading each command help 1 by 1. Special mention to irb, where, up and down commands.

Enjoy your debugging!!