Home / Companies / LogRocket / Blog / Post Details
Content Deep Dive

How to debug Node.js using Chrome DevTools and watchers

Blog post from LogRocket

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Hussain Arif
Word Count
1,600
Language
-
Hacker News Points
-
Summary

Debugging is a crucial step in software development, ensuring stability and enhancing the user experience by guaranteeing quality code. While developers often rely on console.log statements to inspect issues, this method has limitations, such as the inability to track memory usage or set breakpoints. The article explores two alternative debugging methods for Node.js applications: using Chrome DevTools and the built-in Node.js debugger with watchers. Chrome DevTools offers features like breakpoints, memory, and CPU profiling, and source maps, allowing developers to pause code execution at specific points and inspect variable values. The Node.js debugger enables monitoring of variables through the CLI using watchers, which display the current value of variables during execution. Both methods provide developers with powerful tools to track variable changes, monitor memory usage, and optimize performance, ultimately leading to a better user experience.