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Comment by dc-programmer | Hacker News Reader

Dropping in a import pdb; pdb.set_trace() in my pytests and running them from the terminal has helped me squash some pretty difficult bugs. It’s dead simple (same with Ruby pry)

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Since python3.8 you can just call `breakpoint()` and it does the same as `import pdb; pdb.set_trace()`

Also since were on the topic I started using pdb++ and my debugging got incredibly more efficient.

https://github.com/pdbpp/pdbpp

Nice recs, I’ll have to check pdb++ out. Another tip is to add —-pdb to pytest so that it starts the debugger on each test failure.

You should check out ipdb too. That’s my recommendation.

I like ipdb over pdb. All of the niceties of ipython when debugging. If you export `PYTHONBREAKPOINT=ipdb.set_trace` you can use this ipdb too.

I also wanna give a shout out to pudb, for those who want a more visual experience. It uses curses to offer a GUI-like debugging experience while on the terminal. Real nice piece of software.

I do this all the time! I also do this when writing code, like if I'm getting some json blob from an API call, and I'm not quite sure what it is...

PDB is rubbish compared to Debugpy. You should try that instead. With VSCode you get a proper GUI debugging experience.

I’ll check it out. In my current environment I optimize for simplicity and ease of setup, so that means vim + pdb. But that could change in future.

Can you attach pdb to a running python process these days?

That’s a good question and would be interested if anyone knows the answer. I used do this a lot with gdb and C++ server code

Now that I think about it I bet you could attach pdb to a process running the python interpreter and find your way to the right level of abstraction. Does not sound practical though

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