Guide to Python Debugging
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Guide to Python Debugging
1–10 of 149 posts
Re: Guide to Python Debugging
#2Great article, especially nice points about __repr__ helping logging.
PDB as mentioned is great, but IPDB is at a whole 'nother level. If I'm able to get an ipdb breakpoint set in a tricky part of python code, I'm set. Tab-completion, some saved history, normal debugger operations, it's a dream-come true. I often set breakpoints and code iteratively w/ a repl-like interface or explore unfamiliar functions and objects.
Re: Guide to Python Debugging
#3This is a bit of a weird article. It spends most of the time talking about logging, which is somewhat useful for debugging but not really. pdb gets a few lines of description, and that is about it.
Personally, I can't live without Pycharm when working with Python purely because of how fantastic the debugging experience is. The integration with the interactive IPython shell is simply fantastic, and the live variable viewer is also really handy. Between being able to prototype code in the interactive IPython REPL and then graduate it seamlessly to scripts/functions/classes, and then having an amazing debugging UX to fallback on for those bugs that slip through, I find myself to be orders of magnitude more efficient than when coding in something like vscode (which I absolutely love, and want to transition to for Python coding, but it is extremely limited in comparison to Pycharm, especially when it comes to the REPL experience + debugging).
Re: Guide to Python Debugging
#4This is a bit of a weird article. It spends most of the time talking about logging, which is somewhat useful for debugging but not really. pdb gets a few lines of description, and that is about it. Personally, I can't live without Pycharm when working with Python purely because of how fantastic the debugging experience is. The integration with the interactive IPython shell is simply fantastic, and the live variable v…
I second PyCharm, not only from a debugging perspective but as a whole. I don't understand people struggling with generic text editors, development oriented text tools (sublime etc), or even vscode just because they are free when there is a much better tool money can buy (and PyCharm has a free, community version as well).
Re: Guide to Python Debugging
#5Nice article. In particular the -i flag seems really useful.
I'd like to add two packages I learned about recently that I like A LOT: pyrasite and PySnooper.
Use pyrasite to "attach" to an existing running Python process (i.e. you forgot to instrument the app, but it has a bug in it, how can you debug?) (1) Install pyrasite (2) Get the PID of the running process (3) Run `pyrasite dumpstackz0.py` where dumpstackz0.pycontains `import traceback; traceback.print_stack()` (4) The stacktrace will be printed in the stdout/stderr of the running application
Use PySnooper instead of print-debugging—just add a decorator to any python function to get detailed debug info like you normally would get from a full debugger: (A) code: https://github.com/cool-RR/PySnooper (B) pypi: https://pypi.org/project/PySnooper/ (C) talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5imOJc_TE (D) podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUZvgJJKor0
Re: Guide to Python Debugging
#6This is a bit of a weird article. It spends most of the time talking about logging, which is somewhat useful for debugging but not really. pdb gets a few lines of description, and that is about it. Personally, I can't live without Pycharm when working with Python purely because of how fantastic the debugging experience is. The integration with the interactive IPython shell is simply fantastic, and the live variable v…
I second PyCharm, not only from a debugging perspective but as a whole. I don't understand people struggling with generic text editors, development oriented text tools (sublime etc), or even vscode just because they are free when there is a much better tool money can buy (and PyCharm has a free, community version as well).
I'm a vscode user and I do like it. I only really use it for the file navigation and color coding though. Autocomplete drives me nuts, so I turned that off completely. I am a pdb fan so i drop in to that when needed. I never really considered PyCharm to be honest, it feels like overkill for me.
However your allegiance sounds interesting. Can you give some reasons why you like it so much?
Re: Guide to Python Debugging
#7This is a bit of a weird article. It spends most of the time talking about logging, which is somewhat useful for debugging but not really. pdb gets a few lines of description, and that is about it. Personally, I can't live without Pycharm when working with Python purely because of how fantastic the debugging experience is. The integration with the interactive IPython shell is simply fantastic, and the live variable v…
I second PyCharm, not only from a debugging perspective but as a whole. I don't understand people struggling with generic text editors, development oriented text tools (sublime etc), or even vscode just because they are free when there is a much better tool money can buy (and PyCharm has a free, community version as well).
My main reason for wishing to be able to switch to Vscode instead of Pycharm is because vscode's remote development UX is really really nice and works a lot better for me compared to the Pycharm way of SFTP-ing files between your local and the remote.
My use-case where Pycharm feels a bit deficient is that I have an Ubuntu deeplearning box at work that I can VNC into and develop on whenever needed. I have all my repos cloned locally and work on various projects locally (and Pycharm is my IDE of choice on the Ubuntu box). But when I work from home, VNC feels a bit too sluggish and remote development would be much better for me. The vscode experience is pretty fantastic. I can setup SSH access to my box and have an open project for the same repos that I have cloned locally on my Ubuntu box and it's as if I am working on it natively. Everything is super snappy and even my bash sessions have the correct remote venvs activated correctly.
In contrast, every time I tried mimicking this in Pycharm (the paid version), it seemed like there was no way to link my already cloned repos on the Ubuntu box to my local version on my laptop so that work I did locally would always also be "live" on my Ubuntu box so that were I to VNC into my Ubuntu box and open the same project in my local Pycharm IDE, it would exactly mirror the state of my Pycharm IDE on my laptop. Is what I want possible? Everything I tried seem to result in my laptop Pycharm setting up a new project somewhere on my Ubuntu box where it would SFTP my project files to, but that resulted in a duplicate of my repo in some other location, which is not what I want. Hopefully this made sense?
Re: Guide to Python Debugging
#8Great article, especially nice points about __repr__ helping logging. PDB as mentioned is great, but IPDB is at a whole 'nother level. If I'm able to get an ipdb breakpoint set in a tricky part of python code, I'm set. Tab-completion, some saved history, normal debugger operations, it's a dream-come true. I often set breakpoints and code iteratively w/ a repl-like interface or explore unfamiliar functions and objects…
ipdb is one of the nicest command-line debugging experiences I've had. It's wonderful.
Re: Guide to Python Debugging
#9This is a bit of a weird article. It spends most of the time talking about logging, which is somewhat useful for debugging but not really. pdb gets a few lines of description, and that is about it. Personally, I can't live without Pycharm when working with Python purely because of how fantastic the debugging experience is. The integration with the interactive IPython shell is simply fantastic, and the live variable v…
I second PyCharm, not only from a debugging perspective but as a whole. I don't understand people struggling with generic text editors, development oriented text tools (sublime etc), or even vscode just because they are free when there is a much better tool money can buy (and PyCharm has a free, community version as well).
I used the Jetbrains suite for a year or two but I switched back to sublime last year. I have a CLI-centric workflow and I switch between 5-6 different languages, sublime is fast and I can edit whatever languages I want in the same editor. If I want a particular IDE feature there's a good chance I can Ctrl-Shift-P -> Install it with Package Control. I use pudb to debug Python, it works just fine, it lets you drop into an IPython shell too.
But I admit, I work on a weird product stitched from different languages, there's just no IDE that handles that particularly well as far as I know. If I was back to working on Python only I might switch back to PyCharm.
Re: Guide to Python Debugging
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second PyCharm, not only from a debugging perspective but as a whole. I don't understand people struggling with generic text editors, development oriented text tools (sublime etc), or even vscode just because they are free when there is a much better tool money can buy (and PyCharm has a free, community version as well).
I'm a vscode user and I do like it. I only really use it for the file navigation and color coding though. Autocomplete drives me nuts, so I turned that off completely. I am a pdb fan so i drop in to that when needed. I never really considered PyCharm to be honest, it feels like overkill for me. However your allegiance sounds interesting. Can you give some reasons why you like it so much?
Not the person you replied to, but I love vscode from when I did a bunch of React + JS stuff a few years back. I also do a ton of software development and machine learning work in Python now and have never managed to move away from Pycharm even though I'd love to be able to have a good enough experience in Vscode so that I could make the switch from Pycharm (the remote development experience in vscode is really neat which is what attracts me).
In no particular order, here are all the things that I love about Pycharm and that Vscode doesn't really compete on at the moment:
1. Integration of IPython shell (if you install IPython in your project venv) with Pycharm is absolutely amazing. Copy-pasting multi-line code just works. It handles all the auto-indent stuff. You have keyboard shortcuts to directly send highlighted sections of code in the editor to the shell. You can even add a plugin (Python code cell) to make the editor work like Spyder/Matlab's cell mode
2. Excellent history browser of all commands entered in the IPython shell. This is extraordinarily handy as I end up doing all my code prototyping directly in the IPython REPL, fix all the edge cases and issues interactively, and then just grab the things that work and graduate them to a script/function/class. This reduces the overall time to code things up and I end up with far less bugs.
3. The code completion/intelligence is unbelievably good. Vscode's intellisense is really really bad in comparison when it comes to Python. With Vscode, the tab completion almost always feels nonsensical with the ordering of things making no sense, and a lot of times just plain wrong things being suggested in tab completion. By contrast, Pycharm's code completion is really smart, and extremely helpful, especially when filling in method signatures, or trying to tab-complete instance attributes/methods. It is smart enough to even parse type-hinting from docstrings and provide code completion accordingly, which vscode fails at.
4. Refactoring is a lot easier. Code inspection tools are pretty powerful
5. Related to the fantastic REPL experience in Pycharm, the debugging experience is hands-down the best Python debugging experience I have found. Also, the integrated variable viewer/explorer is really really nice and makes debugging that much easier/faster
6. PEP8 linting + auto style refactoring is really good in Pycharm. I've found vscode lacking considerably in that department. Pycharm ends up catching a lot of silly mistakes that vscode doesn't (example: forgetting to have your first param be `self` for an instance method).
7. Managing your project venvs and dependencies is also much easier and more robust in Pycharm. Pycharm will alert you the moment any file utilizes imports not installed in your venv and will also highlight missing dependencies in your requirements.txt / setup.py
I'm sure I'll think of more, but these are some of the top things that come to mind. It is a really fantastic product and what's crazy is that all of the above you get with the free community edition! I actually want to purchase the pro version but haven't found any need for it. I was interested in the remote-code development capabilities but unfortunately have been pretty underwhelmed by that aspect of Pycharm. Vscode seems to have a much better UX on that front imho.