Octopress Debugger

A simple liquid tag for debugging Jekyll sites with a fancy debugger console.

If you're using bundler add this gem to your site's Gemfile in the :jekyll_plugins group:

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'octopress-debugger'
end

Then install the gem with Bundler

$ bundle

To install manually without bundler:

$ gem install octopress-debugger

Then add the gem to your Jekyll configuration.

gems:
  - octopress-debugger

Add the {% debug %} tag to any page to get access to the debugger console when that page is generated.

This will launch an interactive debugging console where you can do some cool things.

Some useful debugger commands:

• continue - to go to the next {% debug %} tag, or step through a loop.
• abort - to exit the debugger.
• help - show manual for the debugger and learn other commands.

I've added some convenience methods for working with the Liquid context.

• c - Liquid's context
• site - Jekyll's Site class instance.
• page - Current Page class instance.
• scopes - Scopes for local variables.

You can pass strings to the c method to inspect variables.

c 'site' # => current site payload hash
c 'page' # => current page payload hash

Dot notation works too:

c 'site.pages'        # => Array of site posts
c 'site.posts.first'  # => First post instance in site posts array
c 'page.layout'       # => Read data from current page
c 'foo'               # => Read locally assigned vars

Debugging is a great way to learn about how Jekyll works. For example, you can step through a for loop like this.

{% assign test='awesome' %}
{% for post in site.posts %}
{% debug %}
{% endfor %}

In the debugger you can type scopes to see a hash representing variables in the for loop. Here's a look at what you might see:

[
  {
    "post"=><Post: /2015/01/12/posts-are-cool>,
    "forloop"=>{
      { "name"=>"post-site.posts", "length"=>3, "index"=>1, … }
    },
  {
    test=>'awesome'
  }
]

You can see the value of post and interact with the post instance with scopes.first['post'] and even see all the available data on the for loop.

Then you can type continue to step through the loop or go to the next {% debug %} tag.

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/octopress/debugger/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request