Django Design Patterns and Best Practices

Other debuggers

There are several drop-in replacements for pdb. They usually have a better interface. Some of the console-based debuggers are as follows:

• ipdb: Like IPython, this has autocomplete, syntax-colored code, and so on.
• pudb: Like old Turbo C IDEs, this shows the code and variables side by side.
• IPython: This is not a debugger. You can get a full IPython shell anywhere in your code by adding the from IPython import embed; embed()line.

PuDB is my preferred replacement for pdb. It is so intuitive that even beginners can easily use this interface. Like pdb, just insert the following code to break the execution of the program:

import pudb; pudb.set_trace()

When this line is executed, a full-screen debugger is launched, as shown here:

Press the ...