Running wdb alongside your development server

2013-10-06 3:31pm

code
flask
python
webdev

We've been using the wonderful wdb WSGI middleware tool at work to aid in debugging our Flask app. The features it brings to the table have helped immensely with development, and it has quickly established itself as a integral part of my toolbox.

One minor issue I had with it, though, was the fact that one needs to manually start the wdb.server.py script before launching a development server. If only I could start and stop wdb whenever Flask did. Some Google-fu introduced me to bash's signal trapping features. After some experimentation, I devised the following wrapper script.

#!/bin/bash function cleanup { echo "" echo "Kill signal detected. Killing wdb server." kill 0 } trap cleanup EXIT echo "Starting wdb server..." wdb.server.py & echo "Done! Starting app server..." # put your app server init here

This has been working quite reliably for us. Here's hoping it helps you!