Debugging Jovo Skills in VS Code

Originally published by Ben Force on August 13th 2018

@theBenForceBen Force

I’ve been wanting to try out the Jovo webhook for a while because of the slick debugging view that it provides, but I also need to set breakpoints in my code and I’d rather not use Chrome DevTools. They’re nice, but if I’m developing in VS Code, that’s where I want to set breakpoints too.

It turns out getting this to work isn’t that difficult, it just took a little bit of time reading through the VS Code launch.json documentation.

Setting the launch program to jovo and passing the run and --inspect args is the obvious choice:

However, since the run command launches all of your code as a child process the debugger will never connect to it. In fact, I never got the server to start.

If I manually execute jovo run --inspect then attach VS Code to the process everything worked fine, but I’m too lazy. I just want to press F5 and have everything work!

Reading through the launch.json documentation, I came across the autoAttachChildProcesses property (more info here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/nodejs/nodejs-debugging#_automatically-attach-debugger-to-nodejs-subprocesses). As the name implies, it causes VS Code to automatically attach to any child processes that are spawned — in this case the jovo server.

Turns out this is all that’s needed to get everything working.

Hopefully this article saves you some time on google, stack overflow, or reading through the VS Code documentation 😒. If you know any other tricks for debugging Jovo skills, please share them in the comments.