Dynamic breaking points in Ruby

Debugging a large codebase can sometimes be a pain, especially if you’re new to it and you don’t know about all the classes and relations in the system.

In this post I’d like to share a cool (IMO) way to debug not well-known codebase using dynamically created breakpoints. NB: yes, Ruby is so dynamic that you can create breakpoints on the go.

Assuming that you use byebug or pry, imagine that you’ve put a breaking point:

class PaymentValidator
  attr_accessor :credit_card

  def initialize(checkout, attributes = {})
    self.credit_card = checkout.create_credit_card
    binding.pry
  end
end

Inside the breaking point, you only know that there is a credit_card object with errors method coming from ActiveModel::Errors. You also expect that some other objects will be calling errors.add, but you don’t know who and how will be doing it.

Here is what you can insert being in the breaking point:

mod = Module.new do
  def add(*args)
    binding.pry
    super
  end
end
credit_card.errors.extend(mod)

This snipped will inject into add method from credit_card.errors and start debugging when someone calls that method. Tricky, eh?

In my case, this dynamic breaking point helped me to find which objects have been adding errors on credit_card object.

As an alternative, I could probably insert a breaking point into the ActiveModel::Errors#add method, but that would trigger too many breaking points that I’m not interested in, because ActiveModel::Errors#add is used in other places of the same system.

Happy debugging!