Got a few really handy debug/development features inside of Catalyst that I have been using lately.
- RenderView‘s dump_info parameter. Basically when using the default view close handler in Catalyst (i.e. Catalyst::Action::RenderView) you can add ?dump_info=1 to the end of any URL in your application server to get the exception dump. While this will need to be turned off in any live environment, it is crazy helpful during development or when hunting down a bug in your code.
- StackTrace is Catalyst plug-in (i.e. Catalyst::Plugin::StackTrace) that gives better detailed information to the server during the request process. You add it to the primary project module library under lib/MyProjectName.pm INSIDE the use Catalyst parameter.
- If you are using Template Toolkit for your Catalyst template layouts you can include the following hook as well. [% USE Dumper(Indent=1) -%] will allow you to Data::Dumper variables to the browser window for debugging purposes. After specifying the use statement you can simply [% Dumper.dump(variablename) %] out anything you want to see. Again, bad for production, but really really good for development.
- Finally, one of my favorites; if you run DBIC_TRACE=1 script/myapp_server.pl -r for your development server (instead of the standard script/myapp_server.pl) you get automatic refreshes AND full DBIC traces of your error messages. Think detailed messages with full function states when your server crashes. The best part is that you simply don’t use the DBIC_TRAC option on production to remove the functionality when you are live.