Hunt down that elusive debug message in Ruby

Posted Over 13 years ago. Visible to the public.

When you just went through a long debug-fest and infested your code with dozens of debug messages, it can be hard to find all those calls to puts and p. This note describes a hack that lets you trace those messages in your code.

Let's say you want to get rid of a console message "foobar". Copy the Undebug class below to config/initializers.rb. In the same initializer, type a line:

Undebug.trace_message('foobar')

Now run tests or whatever you need to do to to trigger that message. The console output should look like this:

Message tracing is active and slowing down the application! Disable me in /home/henning/projects/notes/config/initializers/undebug.rb:34.
foobar
Printed 'foobar' at /home/henning/projects/notes/features/step_definitions/web_steps.rb:280:in `puts'

When you're done, remember to remove that call to Undebug.trace_message because it will slow down your application.

Henning Koch
Last edit
Over 12 years ago
Attachments
Keywords
track, backtrace, debugging, warning, deprecation, notice, test
License
Source code in this card is licensed under the MIT License.
Posted by Henning Koch to makandra dev (2010-11-26 14:12)