Debugging

Annotation Processor

With Gradle

Debugging the annotation processor stage is a bit tricky as you are essentially debugging the Java Compiler (javac). Gradle, however, allows you to attach a debugger during the compilation stage by setting the property org.gradle.debug to true. To start Gradle with that flag, figure out a target that invokes the annotation processor and start it like this:

./gradlew --no-daemon -Dorg.gradle.debug=true :litho-widget:compileDebugJavaWithJavac

In this case we are compiling the litho-widget package.

This will pause the execution during the "Starting Daemon" phase until you connect your debugger. This can be done by running a standard "Remote" target in IntelliJ which will look like this:

Now set a breakpoint at the right point, run your remote target and debug away!

With Buck

Buck doesn't have built-in support for suspending the compiler, but you can still attach a debugger by directly instrumenting the JVM to open a debugging port.

For that, first make sure to kill any previous instances of Buck which may still be running with old flags, then set the JAVA_TOOLS_OPTIONS to contain the JDWP options. Exporting the variable make sure that this is also picked up by child processes spawned by buck. Limiting the number of threads will dramatically speed up the interactive debugging performance as you won't have to wait for the scheduler to come around again and hand you a time slice.

$ buck kill

$ export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS="-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005"

$ buck build --num-threads 1 //litho-widget/...

Note that this won't pause the JVM (suspend=n), but as the process will continue to run you can choose to attach to the process at any time.