Debugging CoffeeScript with the Node Inspector Debugger

For what it’s worth, since we announced the availability of Node Inspector v0.7 last week, we got a few questions about whether or not you could use Node Inspector to debug CoffeeScript. The good news is, yes, you can!

Getting started is straight-forward, just make sure to generate source-maps when compiling your CoffeeScript sources to JavaScript by adding -m option.

For example:

coffee -c -m *.coffee
node-debug app.js

For Grunt users, the plugin grunt-contrib-coffee has an option named sourceMap.

Node Inspector supports source-maps out of the box, so no extra configuration is needed.