Debugging Like a Pro

Press Ctrl+Shift+D to open the Run & Debug view. From here you can create a launch.json, start/stop debugging sessions, and inspect the Call Stack, Variables, Watch, and Breakpoints panels.

Click the gutter (left of line numbers) to add a breakpoint. Right-click for advanced options:

• Conditional breakpoint — only breaks when an expression is true
• Hit count breakpoint — breaks after N hits
• Logpoint — logs a message without stopping (great for production-like debugging)

While paused, use the Debug Console as a live REPL. Evaluate expressions, call functions, and mutate variables on the fly. This is much faster than adding print statements and re-running.

A launch.json file in .vscode/ defines named debug configurations. You can have multiple — one for the dev server, one for unit tests, one for a specific script:

{
  "configurations": [{
    "type": "node",
    "request": "launch",
    "name": "Dev Server",
    "runtimeExecutable": "npm",
    "runtimeArgs": ["run","dev"]
  }]
}