Debugging while developing Django apps

Question

I'm aware of pdb built-in Python library for debugging Python programs and scripts. However, you can't really use it for debugging Django apps (I get errors when I try to use it in views.py). Are there any tools that I can use when Django's traceback isn't helpful ?

EDIT:

from .forms import TestCaseForm, TestCaseSuiteForm
from .models import TestCase, TestSuite
from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserCreationForm
from django.views.generic import FormView, ListView
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.utils.decorators import method_decorator
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
from django.contrib.auth import logout
import pdb

class ListAllTestSuites(ListView):
    template_name = 'list.html'
    context_object_name = 'username'

    def get_queryset(self):
        pdb.set_trace()          # <-- setting a trace here to diagnose the code below
        queryset = {'test_suites': TestSuite.objects.filter(user=self.request.user),
                'username': self.request.user}
        return queryset

Answer 1

you forgot the exact error message and full traceback, and, more importantly, you forgot to explain how you executed this code to get this result...

But anyway: from the error message, you're obviously trying to execute your view file as a plain python script (cf the reference to __main__ ). This cannot work . A view is a module, not a script, and, moreover, any module dependending on Django needs some setup done to be imported (which is why we use the django shell - ./manage.py shell - instead of the regular Python one).

For most case, you can just launch the django shell, import your module and use pdb.runcall() to execute some function / method under the debugger (no need to put a breakpoint then, but that's still possible).

Now views require a HTTPRequest as first argument which make them a bit more cumbersome to debug that way (well, there is django.tests.RequestFactory but still...), so your best bet here is to set your breakpoint, launch your devserver (or restart it - if it didn't already did, as it should), point your browser to the view's url, and then you should see the debugger's prompt in your devserver's terminal.