Debug Mode

Superpowers when you need them the most

Debug mode is a tiny library that puts at your fingertips powerful tools to debug your code.

What you get

If debug_mode is activated (see below) you will have the following functions accessible from everywhere:

• ic from the icecream library. A much better print statement for debugging purposes.
• iex a function decorator from ipdb that will start a debugger session if the decorated function raises an exception. Great for those times when you don't know exactly where things are going wrong.
• wat from wat to allow you to more deeply inspect all your variables.

On top of that, when you go start the debugger with breakpoint() or set_trace() you will drop into ipdb, a much better pdb with wat available there too.

Lastly, debug_mode will create a folder in the current directory named _debug and will store it's path under the name debug_folder and make it globally accessible. This is great place to throw in plots, temporary files, etc.

Usage

To use it simply import it and export the DBG environment variable.

On your code you would normally have the following line sitting there and doing nothing.

import debug_mode

This has zero overhead and truly does nothing. However, 🐛 BUG ALERT 🐛, now you need all the help that you can get to sort things out. To activate debug_mode all you need to do is export DBG, it can hold any value, it just needs to be there. You could accomplish this in many ways.

On your current terminal you could do:

export DBG=1

and all subsequent runs of your code would activate debug mode. Otherwise you could use it only for the next invocation of your script:

DBG=1 python myscript.py

or if you want it always on you could export from your bashrc, zshrc...

Making Ruff happy

I personally use Ruff for all my linting. Understandably he is not to happy about all those global objects that he knows nothing about and will shout out you, e.g for using "undefined" ic.

You can add the following Ruff configuration to your pyproject.toml

[tool.ruff]
builtins = ["ic", "iex", "wat"]

If you already have a [tool.ruff] section on your pyproject just add the builtins part.

Installation

Debug mode is available on pypi:

pip install debug-mode

but you may also just want to copy the debug_mode folder into your project and add it's requirements to your project.

pip install icecream ipdb wat-inspector

Credits

Please leave a ⭐ if you find this useful in your projects.