garytaylor
Stepping Debugger
Hi,
I am new to elixir and loving the performance boost so far. I am a ruby developer primarily.
I have found over the last 5 years that decent test driven development reduces the need to crack open a debugger as my code is tested in smaller and smaller units, but I find a decent debugger invaluable occasionally - sometimes as a learning tool to work out how a framework / gem is working.
Do we have anything like byebug or the ruby debugger where an IDE - or a command line interface can step into, over the next line etc.. and add breakpoints. I really wanted to go through how phoenix works from the request coming in, through to the response going out. But, more importantly, I feel a bit worried about using a language without a debugger. I have seen IEx.pry which is OK, but I prefer not having to change source code as I always forget and leave it in.
Thanks
Gary
Most Liked Responses
sysashi
Hello, have you seen this article? Debugging techniques in Elixir
Since people try to write pure functions (without side effects), it’s easier for me to reason about a chain of transformations, also debugging concurrent app is not trivial i think. Personally I find :observer and ad-hoc IO.inspect satisfy my debugging needs ![]()








