Debugging NodeJS within a Docker Container on VSCode

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So hello, it’s been a while, and I haven’t being keeping up with my daily dispatches, or maybe my days are longer than yours. Relativity man, who knows?

So I was playing around with a Node.js project hosting it using Docker alongside a Postgres database.

And I was all happy and dandy until I wanted to debug an error on VSCode.

And I couldn’t.

So I went far and wide, talked with many friends (I wish), and came across this cool article Debugging uncompiled Typescript code running on a Docker container | by Mitsuhide Ohi | Medium.

This article pointed me towards the right direction, but I had to add a few things.

1 — First of all, I didn’t need to add a debug script to my package.json. I merely replaced my --inspect flag with itself + server_address:port --inspect=0.0.0.0:9229.

2 - I did add the next line on my tsconfig.json.

"sourceMap": true

3 — Here’s where things differ a lot from the article, my vscode launch.json configuration didn’t use the sourceMapPathOverrides (it did nothing for me).

Instead I replaced it with these two cool properties ( remoteRoot and localRoot):

	{
	"name": "Docker Node.js Launch",
	"type": "node",
	"request": "attach",
	"port": 9229,
	"address": "localhost",
	"skipFiles": [
	"<node_internals>/**"
	],
	"remoteRoot": "/usr/app",
	"localRoot": "${workspaceFolder}",
	}

view raw launch.json hosted with ❤ by GitHub

4 — Now to the docker-compose.yml file, I added to my mainApp service the docker port for debugging

	ports:
	- 3000:3000 # my previous port
	- 9229:9229 # docker debugger port

view raw docker-compose.yml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

5 — After all that, I had to run docker-compose up -d --build --force-recreate since I changed the docker-compose.yml file.

And then BOOM! It worked.

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Comments

[Vishangi M]

Thank you so much for sharing such an informative blog with us. Also, I like your way of explanation this blog and looking for other blogs on similar topic.
Regards, Viaana.
Hire NodeJS Developer from CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. ltd.

[Lucas Schiavini]

Just you wait when I drop the Hosting a Ghost Blog using Docker on a Free Cloud Infrastructure