Python post-mortem debugging

Pydump writes the traceback of an exception into a file and can later load it in a Python debugger. It works with the built-in pdb and with other popular debuggers (pudb, ipdb and pdbpp).

Why I wrote this?

I spent way too much time trying to discern details about bugs from logs that don't have enough information in them. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to open a debugger and load the entire stack of the crashed process into it and look around like you would if it crashed on your own machine?

Possible uses

This project (or approach) might be useful in multiprocessing environments running many unattended processes. The most common case for me is on production web servers that I can't really stop and debug. For each exception caught, I write a dump file and I can debug each issue on my own time, on my own box, even if I don't have the source, since the relevant source is stored in the dump file.

Version History

1.2.0

• Port to Python 3

1.1.1

• Fixed a few small bugs.

1.1.0

• Now storing built-in datatypes and custom class data members instead of their string representations.

1.0.0

• First public version