For node developers, the node-inspector package is an excellent tool providing debugger support, when you need it. It reuses the Chrome DevTools debugger user interface, in the same kinda way my old weinre tool for Apache Cordova does. So if you're familiar with Chrome DevTools when debugging your web pages, you'll be right at home with node-inspector.
If you haven't tried node-inspector in a while, give it another try; the
new-ish node-debug command orchestrates the dance between your node app,
the debugger, and your browser, that makes it dirt simple to get the
debugger launched.
Lately I've been doing node development with IBM's Bluemix PaaS, based on the Cloud Foundry. And wanting to use node-inspector. But there's a problem. When you run node-inspector, the following constraints are in play:
- you need to launch your app in debug mode
- you need to run node-inspector on the same machine as the app
- node-inspector runs a web server which provides the UI for the debugger
All well and good, except if the app you are trying to debug is a web server itself. Because with CloudFoundry, an "app" can only use one HTTP port - but you need two - one for your app and one for node-inspector.
And so, the great proxy-splitter hack.
Here's what I'm doing:
- instead of running the actual app, run a shell app
- that shell app is a proxy server
- launch the actual app on some rando port, only visible on that machine
- launch node inspector on some rando port, only visible on that machine
- have the shell app's proxy direct traffic to node-inspector if the incoming URL matches a certain pattern
- for all other URLs the shell app gets, proxy to the actual app
AND IT WORKS!
And then imagine my jaw-dropping surprise, when last week at JSConf, Mikeal Rogers did a presentation on his occupy cloud deployment story, which ALSO uses a proxy splitter to do it's business.
This is a thing, I think.
I've cobbled the node-inspector proxy bits together as cf-node-debug. Still a bit wobbly, but I just finished adding some security support so that you need to enter a userid/password to be able to use the debugger; you don't want strangers on the intertubes "debugging" your app on your behalf, amirite?
This works on BlueMix, but doesn't appear to work correctly on Pivotal Web Services; something bad is happening with the web sockets; perhaps we can work through that next week at Cloud Foundry Summit?
