Debugging and autocompletion in IDE

[okhomenko]

Great article, thanks.

I've been playing with docker-compose for dev a few months back, but still wasn't satisfied as far as debugging and autocompletion.

Since you run everything in docker, you inject your source code into container, but node_modules are not available in IDE for autocompletion.
Another problem is debugging.

Do you handle it somehow?

--
Thanks,
Alex

[anorsich]

@okhomenko This is a very good question! I had exactly same problems and somehow forget to answer them in the blog post.

I don't use much of IDE autocompletion or debug for Javascript applications. Most of the team members use Atom and some code style plugins such as linter and eslint-linter. To make them actually work we had to install eslint and other plugins on a host machine manually.

I can imagine few ways to solve the problem:

1. Hack the ./bin/start.sh script and copy node_modules from running containers to the host machine using docker cp
2. Just install this packages manually from time to time.

As for debugging, I never really used it, but some our team members use node-inspector and just start along with the service like this:

"scripts": {
  "development": "run-p development:*",
   "development:server": "npm run build && NODE_PATH=../shared nodemon --debug=8281 src/app.js",
   "development:inspector": "node-inspector --web-port=8381 --debug-port=8281 --no-preload",
  ...
}

This is part of our package.json for some of the services. In Dockerfile.dev we start an application using npm run development, which starts both application and node-inspector.

Let's see if some of our readers know a better way to overcome these issues.