NodeJS Debugging with Chrome

Anyone who is building an application find out that, what is starting as ‘small project’, becoming very quickly bigger and bigger monster. You can use console.log on small projects but as they are growing you will need better tools. In the arena of “JavaScript on the server” there weren’t many tools to debug your code effectively. However, with the power of open-source projects like: Node, Blink and others there are few powerful ways to debug you code like a pro.

First, for the one that are a bit confuse about NodeJS. Well, it’s not a “JavaScript web server” but an environment to run JavaScript on the server. It is using V8 engine so the performances are very compelling. After using NodeJS inside Compute engine I got few questions about the debugging options. In the past, developers needed to use console.log and similar ‘printing’ commands in order to understand what is going under the hood of their script. But as we mention, when you get out of the area of 100 lines script and your application contain different modules and many more lines of code. You need a debugger (and hopefully other tools like profiler) in your hands. Luckily, we can use Chrome (=Blink) dev tools for your NodeJS applications.
Here are the main steps and the ways to leverage your new ‘hammer’. Continue reading →