Feature Request: tkn debug

[danielhelfand]

While there are certainly features of tkn that aid with debugging a TaskRun or PipelineRun, there isn't, in my opinion, something similar to the experience of using an IDE debugger when both developing Tekton resources (e.g. pipelines/tasks) and figuring out what is wrong with an already developed Tekton resource.

I imagine this feature having the following requirements:

1. Ability to pause and restart pipelines/tasks before or after a task in the case of a pipeline or a step in the case of a task. Think of this as a breakpoint in an IDE.
2. The ability to see the values of variables when a pipeline/task stops at a breakpoint.
3. It would be nice to be able to do all of these actions from an IDE. This is obviously not a requirement for the CLI, but tkn would likely be used by any IDE that wishes to implement this experience. So it's something that should be kept in mind.

As mentioned previously, I think there are two use cases where I see this making sense:
Development - Actually developing pipelines/tasks. The ability to have a similar debugging experience to what developers are familiar with when developing applications I think would greatly help developers actually create CI/CD resources.
Management - Helping teams figure out what has caused a pipeline/task that is actually used for a development process to break.

I do not have any hard opinions on how this could be implemented from a user experience perspective from the CLI. I think this issue can be used to help further define this feature and discuss ideas.

/kind feature

[chmouel]

I'd love to have that too but as you said that goes beyond what CLI can offers and this would need some discussions first on pipeline

Related which i think would be helpful for debugging if implemented #126

[danielhelfand]

Yes, there are a lot of aspects of this that would need to be worked out in pipeline as well as IDE extension projects.

I have seen issues around pausing pipelineruns/taskruns:

• Design: Suspend PipelineRun and TaskRuns after creation
• Design and implement paused Task execution until condition is met

However, none of these quite fulfill this use case, so to your point, an issue/discussion would need to take place there first. I thought of the CLI as a logical middle ground for introducing this idea, but it certainly requires support from other projects.

[tekton-robot]

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[tekton-robot]

@tekton-robot: Closing this issue.

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[vdemeester]

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[vdemeester]

/lifecycle frozen

[lstocchi]

Just found out this issue. Did you discuss more about it in any meeting? I am working on the Tekton plugin in IntelliJ and i would be really interested in having this implemented. Can i help you somehow? Let me know.