Welcome to Bugjar’s documentation!

Bugjar

Bugjar is part of the BeeWare suite. The project website is http://pybee.org/bugjar.

Anyone who learned to code in the mid to late 80s probably spent some time with a Borland compiler – probably either Turbo Pascal or Turbo C. One of the best features of the Turbo compilers was their IDE – and in particular, a really good visual debugger that would let you inspect code while it was running.

Then we all moved to Unix, and somehow forgot what a good debugger was. GDB is perfectly functional, but isn’t very intuitive. GDB gives you perfect control over the execution of your code, but bad contextual information to let you know what control you should be exercising.

Then came Python. Python’s execution model contains excellent debugging hooks, and supplies PDB as a proof of concept. PDB is an interface that shares many similarities with GDB – text mode, fantastic control, but very bad contextual information.

So - enter bugjar. A graphical interface for debugging code. PDB, but with the context to help you step through code in a meaningful way.

Quickstart

Bugjar can be installed with pip:

$ pip install bugjar

You can then debug a Python script by typing the following at a shell prompt:

$ bugjar myscript.py arg1 arg2

This will start a graphical interface, with myscript.py loaded into the source code window. You can set (or remove) breakpoints by clicking on line numbers; you can step through and into code; or you can set the program running unconstrained. Each time the debugger stops at a breakpoint, the inspector will be updated with the current contents of locals, globals, and builtins.

The Python script will run using your current environment; if you have an active virtualenv, that environment will be current.

When you quit the debugger, the script will be terminated.

Documentation

Documentation for bugjar can be found on Read The Docs.

Community

Bugjar is part of the BeeWare suite. You can talk to the community through:

Contents:

Indices and tables