rpdb

rpdb is essentially a Python wrapper around pdb that will re-route stdin and stdout to a socket handler. By default it opens the debugger on port 4444:

import rpdb; rpdb.set_trace()

But you can change that by simply instantiating Rpdb manually:

import rpdb
debugger = rpdb.Rpdb(12345)
debugger.set_trace()

It is known to work on Jython 2.5, Python 2.5 and Python 3.1. It was written originally for Jython since this is pretty much the only way to debug it when running it on Tomcat.

After that your script will "hang" when entering set_trace() and the only way to get it to continue is to access rpdb using telnet, netcat, etc..:

nc 127.0.0.1 4444

Installation on CPython (standard Python)

 python setup.py install

Installation in a Tomcat webapp

Just copy the rpdb directory (the one with the __init__.py file) in your WEB-INF/lib/Lib folder along with the standard Jython library (required).

What is new in this release:

• Catch IOError raised by print in initialization, it may not work in some environments (e.g. mod_wsgi). (Menno Smits)

Requirements:

• Python

Limitations:

• The socket is now closed properly so you will need to ^C in netcat and ^in telnet to exit after a continue.
• For some obscure reason, you will need to run continue twice on Jython.