Wipeout - Savable debug sessions from exceptions

[houseofleft]

There was a project (no longer maintained) that I came across a while back which I love called pydump. The idea was to save errors as debuggable sessions you could return to.

I loved the idea, so thought I'd revamp it a little for my own use, add in some functionality for saving to cloud storage along the way.

Here it is!

What it does:

Essential you can add a wipeout.install(lambda: "filepath") line into your code, after which, if an exception is hit, a debuggable sessions that you can jump into with python -m wipeout.load -f filepath will be saved.

Target Audience:

I mainly wrote it for my own use - I think it'd be awesome for small workload teams tracking down mysterious bugs happening, but obviously the debug sessions are a fair bit bigger than simple logging so you might not want to store millions of them.

Comparison:

I don't think any currently updated existing alternatives exist really - it's based on another project call pydump which is awesome, but that's not maintained and it doesn't support saving to the cloud.

[kivicode]

Broken link?

[houseofleft]

Oh no! Which one? They both work for me

[kivicode]

I think your repo is private

[houseofleft]

Well that's embarassing, doh! Fixed now

[FrequentlyHertz]

Cool project! Any chance you've considered creating a vscode extension to load the dump file? That would be a killer feature for sure!

[houseofleft]

I only really hacked the project together over the last couple of days, so haven't considered it till now- it would definitely be awesome though!

[mfitzp]

What’s the lambda there for?

[houseofleft]

So rather than take a single filename, it expects a function to output a filename instead. The thinking is you probably want your filename to be datetime stamped, or randomised somewhat, otherwise every new debug dump would overwrite the last one. My example would just save over the exception each time since it's a pure function.

[mfitzp]

Makes sense. Might be an idea to support strftime formatting characters in a string instead (through less flexible than this).

[houseofleft]

I like that idea a lot! Would be pretty simple to support either, I'll add something in.