Question

When someone is remotely hitting a Django server (say, not with a browser, but with a robot or other automated tool), what is the “nice” way for me to trace what the server is doing, and attempt to debug any problems?

Answer 1

What you should do

Debugging should not be done on a production server, so you should use a development server, where you can basically use manage.py runserver+ import pdb; pdb.set_trace().

Why couldn’t you do it

Say your dev server is running on a platform like heroku, you might not be able to control how your script is started. From there, using remote-debugging is possible, and here’s how you could do it:

What you could do

If you want to be able to step-in code execution and debug remotely (which is totally innapropriate for a production setup), you could use rpdb. I insist on the fact that you shouldn’t be doing this unless you know what you’re doing (and provided you’re not doing it on a production server!)

Basically, what rpdbdoes is that when you call rpdb.set_trace(), pdb is started and its stdinand stdoutare redirected towards port 4444 (but you can change that of course). You’d then telnet (or netcat, for that matter) to that port and do your debugging thing from there.

Closing words

Really, you shouldn’t be doing this.