Sidekick is a live application debugger that lets you troubleshoot your applications while they keep on running.

Sidekick Open Source is here to allow self-hosting and make live debugging more accessible. Built for everyone who needs extra information from their running applications.

Sidekick Open Source Github repo: (don’t forget to star it ⭐)

Quickstart

We have prepared a simple project to show how you can start live debugging using a self-hosted Sidekick instance in just 5 minutes.

Prerequisites

• Docker

  • Make sure the docker daemon is running.

• npm

  
  

npm install npm@latest -g

• Visual Studio Code

Installation

Running Sidekick with default settings

1. Clone the Sidekick repo

git clone https://github.com/runsidekick/sidekick.git

2. Go to the docker folder under the project

3. Run command docker-compose up -d and wait for a minute

Your Sidekick instance is ready.

Running Quickstart Project

1. Clone the Quickstart Application repo

git clone https://github.com/boroskoyo/sidekick-nodejs-quickstart.git

2. Install NPM packages

npm install

3. Run!

npm start

Now you have your self-hosted Sidekick instance and Quickstart application up and running.

It is time to use a client to put tracepoints and collect data from the Quickstart application.

And live debugging for all!

1. Install Sidekick Extension from the VSCode marketplace:

2. Open the folder of the Quickstart application at VSCode

3. .vscode folder in this repo should set the config for you. If you have any issues just check the instructions here.

4. Now log in using Sidekick plugin.

5. Head to the Sidekick: Trace Events panel to enable it

6. Right-click on the 10th line on app/routes/index.js and put your first tracepoint. Check docs for extra info.

7. Visit http://localhost:3000/ to trigger your tracepoint.

8. Observe your collected trace events at VSCode Sidekick: Trace Events panel!

That’s it!

That is all you need to start using Sidekick Open Source.

Happy debugging y’all!

Also published here.