TipsAndTricks/DebuggingBitbakeInPudb

How to debug bitbake itself with pudb

I recently had the need to debug bitbake and toaster to figure out why toaster was no longer able to save event information to it's database.

It turned out that I wanted to step through a number of the lib/bb/* files to see how the server was being setup.

What I did

. ./poky/oe-init-build-env
. toaster start webport=0.0.0.0:8000

This set up the toaster webserver to run.

Then my debug test:

python3 -m pudb.run $(which bitbake)  quilt-native

I was looking at changes to bitbake/lib/bb/main.py. So, in that file I could set up breakpoints in code like so:

from pudb import set_trace as bp
...
...
bp()
...
...

This allows me to sprinkle programmatic breakpoints wherever I want. If you have a better/preferred way to step through bitbake, feel free to add/change this document.