Interactive debugger, but different

Python has a great debugger in pdb, but sometimes you only want to inspect and buck about with the state. The pdb REPL is a bit inconvenient for that, so here's a different approach. Instead of

import pdb
pdb.set_trace()

Just do

import debugme

This starts an interactive interpreter and exits the program when the interpreter ends. If you want to continue, run this in that interpreter

debugme.exit = False

The variables available in the interactive interpreter are the locals and globals of the frame you imported debugme from.

The debugme object has a few more attributes:

debugme.frame The stack frame that was executing at the time of import debugme.traceback A formatted traceback of the current callstack debugme.exc_info If debugme was imported from sys.excepthook, this will be set to the uncaught exception debugme.back Starts a new interactive interpreter the calling frame

To start a debugme shell automatically when an uncaught exception would terminate your application, you can install an excepthook as follows:

import sys
def excepthook(tp, val, tb):
    sys.__excepthook__(tp, val, tb)
    import debugme
sys.excepthook = excepthook