I have some debugger statements in my module under test and want to run mocha with --debug-brk set and hit my breakpoint so that I can inspect the state of my module. Unfortunately, whenever I run mocha with this option, I end up with a blank cursor on the next line. I can enter text, but there's nothing that appears to be processing my commands (it certainly doesn't look like the node debugger):
$ mocha --debug-brk tests.js -R spec
debugger listening on port 5858
[BLANK CURSOR]
Am I doing something wrong with how I'm launching mocha?
I was able to get this to work using node-inspector. I run my test like you show in one shell:
mocha --debug-brk mocha/test.js
and then run node-inspector in a second shell:
node-inspector
Bringing up the URL that node-inspector spits out in a browser allows me to debug with the web inspector.
http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug?port=5858
To answer the original question, even though I also suggest you look into node-inspector: you can use the CLI debugger built into node through mocha with the debug option, instead of the --debug or --debug-brk flags. (Notice the lack of dashes.)
In your example, instead, it would be:
$ mocha debug tests.js -R spec
debugger listening on port 5858
connecting... ok
break in node_modules/mocha/bin/_mocha:7
5 */
6
7 var program = require('commander')
8 , sprintf = require('util').format
9 , path = require('path')
debug> [CURSOR]
Again, debug as above in bold, with no dashes. (=
If you have node-insector installed you can debug you Mocha tests without actually running node-inspector first. The easiest way is to
node-debug _mocha
That should start debugging the node tests in chrome (also works on Safari)
One reason I have seen that the tests do not work is sometimes you gave to try http://localhost:8080/debug?port=5858 or http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug?port=5858