Question

Does anyone know of a way to run the ruby debugger and SSL at the same time with Thin?

I’ve been using Thin successfully with Rails 3.0.10.

I start it using rails server --debugger, and I can debug my code.

Recently, I have also needed to add SSL support to my application, and I’d like to be able to test it locally with a self-signed certificate.

Unfortunately, I have not found a way to start Thin with SSL support when using rails server.

I can successfully start Thin with SSL support by using:

thin start --ssl --ssl-verify --ssl-key-file ssllocal/server.key
    --ssl-cert-file ssllocal/server.crt

However, I have not found a way to activate the debugger using thin start.

So it seems like I have the choice of running the debugger (rails server) or SSL (thin start), but not both.

It seems possible to get Webrick to run SSL using rails server by modifying the rails/script file (see here). I experimented with this approach, but I have not had success. Here’s one of the attempts:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# This command will automatically be run when you run "rails" with Rails 3
# gems installed from the root of your application.

APP_PATH = File.expand_path('../../config/application',  __FILE__)
require File.expand_path('../../config/boot',  __FILE__)


# THIS IS NEW:
require "rails/commands/server"
require 'rack'
require 'thin'
module Rails
  class Server
    def default_options
      super.merge({
        :Port        => 3000,
        :environment => (ENV['RAILS_ENV'] || "development").dup,
        :daemonize   => false,
        :debugger    => false,
        :pid         => File.expand_path("tmp/pids/server.pid"),
        :config      => File.expand_path("config.ru"),
        :SSLEnable   => true
        :ssl => true,
        "ssl-verify" => true,
        "ssl-key-file" => File.expand_path("ssllocal/server.key"),
        "ssl-cert-file" => File.expand_path("ssllocal/server.crt")       
      })
    end
  end
end


require 'rails/commands'

Note: for those who might be wondering, I created an ‘ssllocal’ directory off my root application directory, and that’s where I store the ssl keys and certs.

Answer 1

You could try just requiring the debugger yourself in your development environment.

In your Gemfile:

if RUBY_VERSION =~ /^1.9/
  gem "ruby-debug19", :group => :development
else
  gem "ruby-debug", :group => :development
end

And within the config block of your config/environments/development.rb:

require 'ruby-debug'
Debugger.start

This permits you to place the debugger statement anywhere in your code.