This evening I spent 30 minutes to try out rconsole in the package rfoo . It’s a simple environment to inspect and modify the namespace of a running script.
If you are on debian, you need to install two packages :
sudo aptitude install cython python-dev
Then download the source code. If you want to try it out without installing you have to compile it with the —inplace option :
python setup.py build_ext --inplace
Now you’re ready to go. Add in your views.py file the following code:
from rfoo.utils import rconsole
rconsole.spawn_server()
In a console type python scripts/rconsole. Keep in mind that you
have to adjust your import search path in order to use the rconsole
script without installing the library.
Then you can now directly call all methods in your views from the console. For example, imagine you have a search view, then you can call it with :
>>> from django.http import HttpRequest
>>> request = HttpRequest()
>>> search(request,"debian")
<django.http.HttpResponse object at 0x2bc7490>
>>> search(request,"debian").content
'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>\n<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"\n "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">\n<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">\n <head>\n
....
>>>
I’ve to say that using rconsole for debugging it not very useful. pdb or winpdb are much more powerful and versatile. It was worth a try anyway…
Update
After getting in touch with the author of rconsole, I think it is important to put in context this post. I’ve tried rconsole with django in mind. On one hand, I was looking for a debugger that I could use in an early development stage of a project. In this context, I think a bloking debugger can do a much better job then rconsole to help the programmer to inspect variables and insert break points. rconsole is a non-blocking debugger and it is not the right tool.
On the other hand, rconsole can be of great help when debugging a live application when you don’t have the luxury to stop your server. In this regard rconsole is very lightweight and unobtrusive, and I think it can be of great help.
I had the impression I’ve been a bit unfair in my judgment…