Now that you know what pdb
is, it’s time to get started! You can break into the debugger with just a single line of Python code:
import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
When execution reaches this point, the program stops and you’re dropped into the pdb
debugger. If you’re using Python 3.7 or later, then you can also use breakpoint()
instead. You can automatically enable or disable all of your breakpoint()
calls by modifying environment variables.
pdb
also supports post-mortem debugging, which will tell Python to drop you into a pdb
prompt as soon as an exception is reached. This is useful for when you don’t have write access to a Python script but still want to debug it. Just run your script like this:
$ python3 -m pdb my_script.py