Sometimes, I get a bug that I just can’t reproduce in the local environment. Still, this bug is very much present in the testing environment (dev or staging).

If I can’t reproduce it, I can’t write a good test to cover this case. And from this point on, bug fixing is just one commit after another with a message “bug fix #”. Each time you need to wait for the CI/CD pipeline, and after a few tries, your workday is pretty much over :(

Everybody who has been in this situation knows just how frustrating it might be. I remember how I spent 2-3 hours comparing environments only to realize that there’s a bug that appears only on a Docker-container-specific JVM.

But what if you could debug code not on your local machine, but remotely? It appears that you actually can! Let’s take a look at how to do it with Java. It’s not that difficult.

In the script where you launch your Java app, you need to pass special parameters:

-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=*:5005

So now your launch command will look something like this:

java -jar -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=*:5005 app.jar

You might want to change :5005 to the port of your choice. This is the port on which the debug socket will be exposed.

WARNING! This parameter must not be used in production. Remote debug allows remote code execution.

Now you can use your IDE to attach a debugger to your remote running application. You just need to do the last step - add a debug configuration. You can do that in the Run/Debug Configurations menu. Choose Remote JVM Debug and set the host that your application is running on & the debug socket port.

That’s it. Now you can debug code on the staging environment as if it was running locally.

Conclusion

I highly encourage you to research this topic for a language of your choice, as this ability might save you a lot of time. You can use this to debug not only the app that is running on a different machine but also that is running in Docker locally.

Here are some resources I found for you:

©2023 by Mykhailo Fomenko