How do you run and debug Ruby on Rails from Visual Studio Code?

Question

• How can you launch Ruby on Rails using the built-in Visual Studio Code Launch/Debug features?

• How do you fix the Debugger terminal error: Process

Answer 1

I spent most of a day trying to solve this.

I ended up stripping my launch.json config down to the following:

"configurations": [
    {
       "name": "Rails server",
        "type": "Ruby",
        "request": "launch",
        "cwd": "${workspaceRoot}",
        "program": "/Users/mitch/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.0@gg_portal/bin/rails",
        "args": [
            "server"
        ],
        "useBundler": true,
        "pathToRDebugIDE": "/Users/mitch/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.0@gg_portal/gems/ruby-debug-ide-0.6.1",
        "pathToBundler": "/Users/mitch/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.0@gg_portal/wrappers/bundle",
        "showDebuggerOutput": true
    }

]

Firstly, especially if you're using RVM & have different Gemsets, make sure your paths are consistent with the correct Gemset.

What solved the problem for me was pathToBundler.

which bundle
/Users/mitch/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.0@gg_portal/bin/bundle

There looks to be some incompatibility around setting the path to the binstubs bundler (shown above) and the bundler pointed to from /wrappers/ (shown below), so changing pathToBundler to:

"pathToBundler": "/Users/mitch/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.0@gg_portal/wrappers/bundle",

solved the problem.

There is a kind of related discussion here:

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/31193

which talks about binstubs though not specifically VSCode & debugging.