A Quick Protip When Debugging Node with Chrome Tools

• John Vandivier

Did you know you can <a href="https://medium.com/@paul_irish/debugging-node-js-nightlies-with-chrome-devtools-7c4a1b95ae27">use Chrome tools to debug Node? You can and it's awesome.

But, when you are using the Dev Tools Workspace feature, also normally awesome, an annoying thing can happen: You get duplicated results because it is being read out of the file system and also out of the Workspace sources. Worse yet: If you put your debugger on one of them it doesn't work at all!

The solution is simple: Always refer to the version on the file system, eg the one circled below. The debugger works on that file (click to zoom):

<a href="http://www.afterecon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/node-debugger-dev-tools.png"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-6489 size-large" src="http://www.afterecon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/node-debugger-dev-tools-1024x622.png" alt="" width="605" height="367" />

If you have a very small and/or fast Node program you might run into an issue where debuggers can't catch. The fix is to <a href="https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/17890#issuecomment-354218252">use a wait function or the --inspect-brk option.

As a final note, Paul Irish rocks.