Debugging Cloudify Workers

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Using the debugger with cloudify

While some parts of cloudify do run locally (eg. the CLI, or the system tests framework) and can be run under a regular debugger (eg. pudb <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pudb>_), most of the interesting parts run in remote tasks on the Cloudify Manager, so a regular debugger won’t work with that.

Remote debugger for executions

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Cloudify does not use anymore celery for running executions but for sake of backward compatibility we still install it in the environment.

We can use remote celery, use rdb, eg. use a text editor to

    from celery.contrib import rdb
    rdb.set_trace()

Then it will start listening on port 6899 (by default), or if that is already in use, 6900, 6901, …

Connect to the debugger using telnet or nc (on centos, you need to install them using eg. yum install telnet or yum install nc), like telnet 127.0.0.1 6900.

Sometimes it might be hard to guess which port it’s using; you can simply guess or look at the open ports and make a more informed guess. The following command might be useful:

$ netstat -tulpn | grep python

Shows ports that processes named “python” are listening on. (on a cloudify manager usually it’ll be just the REST service, and your debuggers)

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Remember that after adding `.set_trace()`, you need to restart the process
running that code (usually it'll be mgmtworker - or gunicorn if you're
working on the REST service).
`sudo systemctl restart cloudify-mgmtworker`
`sudo systemctl restart cloudify-restservice`

Also read the Celery RDB docs <http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/tutorials/debugging.html>_.

Where to put set_trace?

If you’d like to put a set_trace call inside cloudify code that will be used by the management worker, edit files inside /opt/mgmtworker/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages, eg. /opt/mgmtworker/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudify/dispatch.py

Restarting Cloudify workers

After adding a set_trace, you need to restart Cloudify workers so it loads the new code. To do it, best to simply do sudo systemctl restart cloudify-mgmtworker.

Anyway, it is a good idea to tail the mgmtworker logs to verify that it did restart successfully (/var/log/mgmtworker/cloudify-mgmtworker.log)

Debugging on agent machines

Celery is also installed on agent machines - the virtualenv is usually located in /home/<agent_user>/<node_name>/env/, eg /home/centos/vm_a1b2c3/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudify/dispatch.py.

Restarting agent workers there depends on the process management method, but with the most commonly used initd, you would do

$ systemctl restart cloudify-worker-node_name

PDB primer

rdb is simply pdb using a network socket; all the regular pdb commands can still be used with it. See the pdb docs and this talk to learn how to use pdb.

Attaching remote debugger Pycharm

For attaching remote debugger in Pycharm you need to have Professional Edition license. You can follow this instruction.