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Debugging QA-Board' runs in an IDE

How to debug runs​

In most cases you want to debug code and set breakpoints inside your run() function. That means you want to debug individual runs, not a whole batch.

tip

If you try to debug the qa batch command, your debugger will not be able to attach to the runs. Those at best will happen in a different subprocess (if using qa batch --runner=local), and at worst on a different computer (if using distributed job schedulers).

To know what qa run command you need to debug, you can:

  • Look at the logs of your run in the web UI: it's at the top.
  • Run qa --dryrun batch xxxx to just print the individual qa run commands executed in a batch.

Debugging with PyCharm​

Edit your "debug configurations" like this:

  • Module name: qaboard (make sure you select "module" not "script" in the dropdown menu).
  • Parameters: CLI parameters for qa: run -i images/A.jpg. Don't write qa, and make sure you debug a run command, not a batch.
  • Working directory: Check it’s defined as the directory with qaboard.yaml. If this directory happens to have a subfolder named "qaboard", use it.
pyCharm setup

In some cases you'll also need to define as environment variables LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 LANG=en_US.utf8

Debugging with VSCode​

To configure debugging, the editor opens a file called launch.json. You want to add configurations that look like those:

{
  "name": "qaboard",
  "type": "python",
  "request": "launch",
  "module": "qaboard",
  "args": [
    "--help",
  ]
},

To debug qa run, for instance:

  "args": [
    "--database",
    ".",
    "run", // don't debug "qa batch" command
    "--input",
    "images/A.jpg",
  ]
caution

Don't start args with "--": qa now treats everything after -- as arguments forwarded to your code, so the command would be ignored.

Here is a more in-depth review of your options at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/debugging