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Bogdan Alexandru Militaru
Bogdan Alexandru Militaru

Posted on • Originally published at boobo94.xyz on

VSCode debugger config with Mocha and Babel 7

The post VSCode debugger config with Mocha and Babel 7 appeared first on boobo94. So if you want to read more articles like this please subscribe to my newsletter or follow me here

VSCode debugger is a very nice tool that you can use in every project. I personally prefer VSCode for most programming languages that I write code. The minimalism and extendability make it very powerful.

If you wanna know more about my VSCode configurations and extensions that I use check VSCode setup for web development: settings and extensions.

These days I tried to configure the VSCode debugger for a Node.js project that I’m working on in testing mode. I use Babel 7 and Mocha framework for tests. Apparently everything looks very simple and intuitive because the VSCode offers support to create a new config for different tasks, so I choose the default one for Mocha.

I encountered a few issues trying to run the VSCode debugger with Mocha and Babel 7, but the configuration is not very hard and can be shown below:

{
      "type": "node",
      "request": "launch",
      "name": "Mocha Tests",
      "program": "${workspaceFolder}/node_modules/mocha/bin/_mocha",
      "runtimeArgs": [],
      "args": [
        "${workspaceFolder}/test/**/*.js",
        "--require",
        "@babel/register",
        "-u",
        "bdd",
        "--timeout",
        "999999",
        "--colors"
      ],
      "env": {
        "NODE_ENV": "test",
      },
      "internalConsoleOptions": "openOnSessionStart"
    }
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Firstly I had to change the type from tdd to bdd , because Mocha runs as bdd. Secondly is very important to pass the needed plugins in order for Node to interpret the code correctly. Please observe –require @babel/core.

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The post VSCode debugger config with Mocha and Babel 7 appeared first on boobo94. So if you want to read more articles like this please subscribe to my newsletter or follow me here

Top comments (1)

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yaireo profile image
Yair Even Or • Edited

Why can't it just use the mocha config done in the project's root?

.mocharc.json 
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I would rather vscode use my already-existing configuration than define the args manually in the launch file