Debugging-with-Vscode.md

Debugging with VSCode

We can debug our VirtualFluids application within the docker container in VS Code. This wiki page describes how to do that.

1. Most important: VirtualFluids default build is Release. For debugging, the build type must be changed during the cmake process:

   cmake --preset=all_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..

   The variable CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE is a native cmake variable and used to specifiy the build type. The available options are: Debug, Release, RelWithDebInfo, MinSizeRel (cmake-doc).

2. In VS Code we can now add a debug configuration file to our project. The debugging configuration information is stored in the file .vscode/launch.json. To add the first debug configuration, we need to create this file manually.

   Then one possible configuration for gdb may look like this:

   A file to start from can be found here: launch.json.

3. A very important entry in this file is "program": . Here we need to add the path to the executable we want to debug.

4. Now we can start debugging by adding a breakpoint to the specific file. To do this, we click on a line number on the left:

   

   The debugging can be started in the debugging tab:

   

   Here we can also monitor variables and the call stack:

   

Additionally VS Code provides a nice documentation as well:

• Debugging in General
• C++ launch.json Reference