How should I debug Trac plugins?

I'm about to start a fair amount of work extending Trac to fit our business requirements. So far I've used pythonWin and now Netbeans 6.5 as the development environments - neither of these seem to provide any way of debugging the plugin I am working on.

I'm totally new to Python so probably have not set up the development environment how it could be congfigured to get it debugging.

Am I missing something obvious? It seems a bit archaic to have to resort to printing debug messages to the Trac log, which is how I'm debugging at the moment.

Solution

You can create a wrapper wsgi script and run it in a debugger. For example:

import os
import trac.web.main

os.environ['TRAC_ENV'] = '/path/to/your/trac/env'

application = trac.web.main.dispatch_request

from flup.server.fcgi import WSGIServer
server = WSGIServer(application, bindAddress=("127.0.0.1", 9000), )
server.run()

You would run this script in the debugger, and you can use lighttpd as a frontend for the web application with a trivial config like this one:

server.document-root = "/path/to/your/trac/env"
server.port = 1234
server.modules = ( "mod_fastcgi" )
server.pid-file = "/path/to/your/trac/env/httpd.pid"
server.errorlog = "/path/to/your/trac/env/error.log"
fastcgi.server = ( "/" =>
  (( "host" => "127.0.0.1",
     "port" => 9000,
     "docroot" => "/",
     "check-local" => "disable",
  ))
)

Just run the fcgi wsgi wrapper in the debugger, set the breakpoints in your plugin, and open the web page.