Python Debugger

I thought I will document this somewhere in case its useful to anyone.

I recently had to do some work with the python debugger which is cool, but does not support any command line completion or even a history. I googled and apparently you can use ipython as a debugger but I could not get it to work properly.

I found some code on the net to do completion and I added a bit of history. To do this you need to add the following files:

~/.pdbrc.py:

import os.path, os 
 
# save this in .pdbrc.py in your home directory 
def complete(self, text, state): 
    """return the next possible completion for text, using the current frame's 
       local namespace 
 
       This is called successively with state == 0, 1, 2, ... until it 
       returns None.  The completion should begin with 'text'. 
    """ 
    try:

        import rlcompleter

        # keep a completer class, and make sure that it uses the current local scope  
        if not hasattr(self, 'completer'): 
            self.completer = rlcompleter.Completer(self.curframe.f_locals) 
        else: 
            self.completer.namespace = self.curframe.f_locals 
        return self.completer.complete(text, state) 
    except Exception,e: 
        print e 

and ~/.pdbrc

# save this in .pdbrc in your home directory 
import os 
import sys 
# import rlcompleter early, as it contains side effects 
import rlcompleter 
# refresh the terminal 
os.system("stty sane") 
# this rc file takes single lines, so define our complete function here 
execfile(os.path.expanduser("~/.pdbrc.py")) 
# replace the Pdb class's complete method with ours 
sys._getframe(1).f_globals['Pdb'].complete = complete 
# set use_rawinput to 1 as tab completion relies on rawinput being used 
sys._getframe(1).f_locals['self'].use_rawinput = 1