Node: proposal: programmatically expose the V8 inspector URL

[ide]

• Version: 7.6.0 and later
• Platform: all
• Subsystem: diagnostics

This is a feature request to add a method to the v8 module that exposes the V8 inspector URL if the process has been started with --inspect. The motivation for this feature is to conveniently add links or buttons to a website that the developer can click to open the V8 inspector.

This is a hypothetical API:

$ node --inspect=dev.example.com:1337
> require('v8').getInspectorUri()
chrome-devtools://devtools/bundled/inspector.html?experiments=true&v8only=true&ws=dev.example.com:1337/8fe96e86-fa03-4a24-b21d-2ce3725e479e

$ node
> require('v8').getInspectorUri()
null

[bnoordhuis]

Should be easy enough to do but let's see what @nodejs/v8-inspector thinks.

[Fishrock123]

Sounds like a good idea to me. I think it should probably not be on the V8 module though?

[eugeneo]

We have plans of introducing bindings for inspector API (it is currently blocked on inspector becoming the default debug API, e.g. by installing the debug signal handler). I believe we could expose this url as a part of that API. API details are still TBD (e.g. I did not even open a pull request)...

[joshgav]

FWIW you can get the URI and other metadata like the UUID from the JSON returned from http://localhost:9229/json/list (or http://localhost:9229/json) too. See https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/11207 for an example of that output.

@ofrobots @cristiancavalli @eugeneo are working on providing a JS API to Inspector in general, perhaps access to the list JSON object could be part of that API and cover this request too.

/cc @nodejs/diagnostics

[jasnell]

This seems like a good idea. Perhaps even one step further ... an API that simply returns the same data as the /json/list endpoint.

As for where it should live, perhaps when running with --inspect, this can be exposed via process.inspectInfo() API. When running without --inspect, it would simply return undefined

[eugeneo]

WIP JS bindings version I have (
https://github.com/eugeneo/node/tree/js-bindings) has a project.inspector
object so it will be easy to expose targets there. But I am not sure what
it will take to land such an API change.

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 8:48 AM James M Snell [e-mail]
wrote:

This seems like a good idea. Perhaps even one step further ... an API that
simply returns the same data as the /json/list endpoint.

As for where it should live, perhaps when running with --inspect, this
can be exposed via process.inspectInfo() API. When running without
--inspect, it would simply return undefined

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[rumkin]

I think this URI should be also predictable and partially configurable from command line. As I mentioned in #11701 I'm working with remote debug and automated tools doesn't allow to extract this URI from node output.

[Trott]

Is this in progress? Stalled? Blocked? Help wanted? I guess /cc @eugeneo but really anyone that knows?

[TimothyGu]

The requested feature is now provided in inspector.url(), so closing.