Products.PDBDebugMode

Enable various PDB debugging when debug-mode=on

When Zope is running in debug mode this product hooks PDB debugging into various parts of a Zope instance. Some additional Plone specific hooks are also included.

Requirements

This version of PDBDebugMode has been tested with Plone 6.2 on Python 3.10-3.13.

For Zope4 and Plone 5.2 in Python 2.7, 3.6 and 3.7 please use Products.PDBDebugMode = 2.1.

For Zope 2 (until Plone 5.1) please use Products.PDBDebugMode = 1.3.

If ipdb (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ipdb) is available, it will use that instead of standard pdb.

Its recommended that you use an editor or IDE that can cooperate with pdb. Emacs for example, will display the corresponding lines of the source file alongside the pdb prompt.

Remember that this product does nothing unless zope is being run with debug-mode=on such as with ./bin/instance fg.

Post-Mortem Debugging

To provide for better investigation of errors, any error or exception logged with the python logging module will invoke pdb.post_mortem() if a traceback can be retrieved and set_trace will be invoked otherwise. Since the Zope error_log exception handler uses the logging module when logging errors, this provides for post mortem debugging of Zope errors. It is often useful, for example, to remove NotFound or Unauthorized from the ignored exception in error_log and then investigate such errors with PDB.

Runcall Requests

Any request that has the key pdb_runcall will call the result of the request traversal in the debugger thus allowing for stepping through the resulting execution. To debug a POST or any other request which might be tricky to insert the pdb_runcall key into, use ?toggle_runcall=1 at the end of a URL immediately preceding the POST to set a pdb_runcall cookie which will then invoke the pdb.runcall when the POST is submitted. Use ?toggle_runcall=1 at the end of a URL to clear the cookie. Remember that the cookie will be set at the level in the hierarchy that it was set.

Debug View

Additionally, a view named pdb is registered for all objects that will simply raise an exception leaving you with the current context to inspect. Use it for example by calling http://localhost:8080/Plone/foo/@@pdb.

Allow Import of pdb

Import of the pdb module is also allowed in unprotected code such as python scripts.

Changelog

3.0.0 (2025-12-23)

Breaking changes:

• Replace pkg_resources namespace with PEP 420 native namespace. Support only Plone 6.2 and Python 3.10+. #3928

Internal:

• Move distribution to src layout @gforcada #4217
• Update configuration files @plone

2.1 (2025-06-19)

Bug fixes:

• Include dependencies in zcml to fix use in a pip-based install. @pbauer

2.0 (2019-04-01)

New features:

• Add log-message on startup. @pbauer

Bug fixes:

• Remove post_mortem in tests since that feature is now a part of zope.testrunner and is unneeded here. Fixes https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/2803 @pbauer

• Remove traces of support for Zope 2. @pbauer

1.4 (2019-03-02)

Breaking changes:

• Make compatible with Zope4 and drop support for Zope 2. @pbauer

New features:

• Add compatibility for Python 3 and 2. @frapell

• Improve debug mode detection, provide a ZCML feature, and enable when running tests with '-D'. @rpatterson

• Add zope.testrunner support. @rpatterson

• Add some missing iPython support for runcall and broken_delete. @rpatterson

Bug fixes:

• Apparently the ipdb support only works with ipdb 0.3 or greater. Added an "ipdb" extra for this requirement. @rossp

• Fix ipdb import in zcatalog.py. @pabo

1.3 - 2011-01-14

• Ignore invalid GenericSetup handlers. @rossp

• Use ipdb when available. @neaj

1.2 - 2011-01-07

• Add some zopectl scripts I use when evaluating upgrades. @rossp

• Better handling of exceptions while checking error matching. @rossp

• Fix a problem with doing post_mortem debugging of error_log ignored exceptions. @rossp

• Fix handling of socket errors

• Fix handling of SiteErrorLog tracebacks

• Fix handling of exc_info logging arg

1.1 - 2009-04-18

• Fix a bug due to a change in monkeypatcher

1.0 - 2009-04-10

• Add collective.monkeypatcher as a requirement @kdeldycke

• Fix some recursion errors

0.3 - 2009-04-08

• Use collective.monkeypatcher to move all patches into ZCML

• Fully deprecate the Zope exception handler in favor of the logging hook since the Zope exception handler uses the logging module anyways and more can be done by hooking at that level.

• Handle failed matches in Products.PDBDebugMode.pdblogging more gracefully

• More flexible log matching. Change Products.PDBDebugMode.pdblogging.ignore_regexes to ignore_matchers and accept any callable.

0.2 - 2008-05-15

• Eggified

0.1 - 2006-03-11

• Initial release