The pyramid debug toolbar

The pyramid webserver comes with an integrated debug toolbar that offers a lot of information to ease development. To ease the development process in CubicWeb a series of custom debug panels have been developped especially for that purpose.

To use the pyramid debug toolbar in CubicWeb, you need to:

  • install it either by doing a pip install pyramid_debugtoolbar or following the official installation instructions
  • launch the pyramid command adding the -t/–toolbar argument to enable it like so: cubicweb-ctl pyramid my_instance -t (you probably want to add -D to activate the debug mode during development)
  • navigate to the website and click on the icon on the right like on this screenshot:
book/pyramid/../../images/debug_toolbar_icon.png

And you’ll have access to the debug toolbar content for this page.

Custom panels

A series of custom debug panels have been written to offer more useful debug information during development. Here is the list:

General ‘CubicWeb’ Panel

Provides:

  • currently selected controller for this with and uri/requests information
  • current instance configuration, options that differs from default ones are in bold
  • a list of useful links like on the default CW home

Screenshot:

../../../_images/debugtoolbar_general_panel.png

Registry Decisions Panel

Provides:

  • a list of all decisions taken in all registry during this page construction
  • the arguments given to take the decision
  • all the selection entities during decisions with their score
  • which one has won if any
../../../_images/debugtoolbar_registry_decisions_panel.png

Registry Store

Provides:

  • a listing of all the content of the different registries
  • for each entity its detailed information
../../../_images/debugtoolbar_registry_content_panel.png

RQL

Provides:

  • a list of all executed RQL queries during this page creation
  • for each RQL query all the generated SQL queries
  • detail information like the result, the args and the description of each query
  • the call stack on each query to see where it has been called
../../../_images/debugtoolbar_rql_panel.png ../../../_images/debugtoolbar_rql_traceback_panel.png

SQL

Provides:

  • a list of all executed SQL queries during this page creation
  • for each SQL query the RQL query that has generated it, if any (some aren’t)
  • detail information like the result, the args and if the query has rollback
  • the call stack on each query to see where it has been called
../../../_images/debugtoolbar_sql_panel.png

Accessing the sources of the class/functions/method listing the debug panels

A traversal of all those custom panels is the see the source code of all listing class/functions/methods. You can access those by:

  • clicking on the [source] close to the target when available
  • clicking on the file path in the traceback stack
../../../_images/debugtoolbar_show_source_link.png ../../../_images/debugtoolbar_traceback_source_link.png

You be sent to a page looking like this:

../../../_images/debugtoolbar_show_source.png

Contributing

All source code for the custom panels is located here and the documentation of how to write custom toolbar panels here.