Attach the debugger to a remote instance of python process

[DonJayamanne]

E.g. attach debugger to remote python processes

Scenarios:

• Debug existing remote python process on remote server
• Debug existing remote python process in docker container
• This is identical to attach to local procecss, except we're attaching to a remote process.

Workflow:

• User clicks some button or click start remote debugging
• We prompt user for SSH credentiails
• We connect to remote server over SSH
• We display a list of remote python processes that are running in a dropdown list
• User selects a python process from the dropdown list
• Next, we attach the debugger to the remote process just as we attach to a local process (inject debugger).
  • I.e. copy ptvsd to remote server (or remote pip install, etc)
  • Inject ptvsd into process
  • Start debugger in attach mode (as will be done for multi-process debugging in ptvsd).
  • Go back to VSC with the necessary information
• From local VSC, attach the to remote debug server (we have IP and port, and other information).

User is now debugging a remote process

[galuszkak]

That would be great. This is something, that I miss most when working in with docker-compose in my workflow. If there is a way to enable this working with docker quickly that would be super awesome!

[DonJayamanne]

This is possible today, this is achieved via Remote Debugging feature.

• Option 1: Please have a look at the Remote debugging section in the documentation.
• Option 2: You can use the experimental debugger to achieve this as follows:
  • pip install ptvsd --pre into your docker container
  • Start the program in debug mode (use the following as the value for CMD in your docker file: python -m ptvsd --server --port 5678 --file xyz.py
  • Where 5678 is the port to be exposed for debugging, and xyz.py is the file to be debugged.
  • Note: You'll need to use the experimental debugger.

E.g. attach debugger to remote docker container

Unfortunately there's no way to attach to a remove process. The only way to achieve something similar is:

• Launch the remote process (docker container) and host the debugger libraries
• Please see the two solutions provided in the previous section.

[DonJayamanne]

@brettcannon When I created this issue, I don't quite remember the use case for this. Currently we can do this with the remote debugging options we have.
Once the experimental debugger is released, I believe we can close this issue.

[brettcannon]

I think you opened this to provide some UX for it to occur so it wasn't so manual.

[qubitron]

This issue is outdated, we're looking at other ways of solving this