Debugging in Ruby with pry-byebug
For a software engineer, even the basic use of a debugger can save a lot of pain: adding breakpoints (places in the code the program will stop at and expose the current context) is very easy, and navigating from one breakpoint to another isn't difficult either.
And with just that, you can say goodbye to a program's many puts and runs. Just add one or more breakpoints and run your program. Then you're able to access not only the variables and objects you might have thought of, but also anything accessible from that point in the code.
In this article, we'll focus on pry-byebug, a gem that adds debugging and stack navigation to pry using byebug. We will see how to set up and use pry-byebug, how it integrates with Ruby programs, and a few advanced techniques.
The setup is really simple. Just add the pry-byebug gem to your Gemfile, and then run bundle install. I'd advise you to add it to the development and test groups to debug tests as well.
