Inspector Panel

So long as I can put print statements in the code, and can read it thoroughly, I can usually find the bugs.

Joshua Bloch, about his techniques for debugging programs (extracted from Coders at work)

Inspector panel is intended to retrieve information about variables when developing Django applications.

The panel must be used with django-debug-toolbar.

Motivation

Have you found yourself doing this all the time?:

def my_view(request):
    my_var = some_third_party_function()
    print my_var
    print type(my_var)
    #...

Well, I used to do that a lot. So, I decided to write this simple panel.

The idea is to use just one function dj_debug and get lots of information. Here's an example of a real Django App:

def index(request):
    latest_poll_list = Poll.published.all().order_by('-pub_date')[:5]
    dj_debug(latest_poll_list)  # Just add this line
    return render_to_response('polls/index.html', {'latest_poll_list': latest_poll_list})

You get first some information in the Debug Toolbar:

And you can optionally get the same info in the console:

Installation

$ pip install git+git://github.com/santiagobasulto/debug-inspector-panel

Add the panel to the DEBUG_TOOLBAR_PANELS settings variable:

DEBUG_TOOLBAR_PANELS = (
    ...
    'inspector_panel.panels.inspector.InspectorPanel',
    ...
)

Add inspector_panel to your INSTALLED_APPS

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # ... More Apps ... #
    'debug_toolbar',
    'inspector_panel'
)

Add this setting variable:

DEBUG_INSPECTOR_PANEL_EXTEND_BUILTINS = True

If DEBUG_INSPECTOR_PANEL_EXTEND_BUILTINS is set to True, debug inspector panel will add a builtin function called dj_debug that you can use without importing anything. If you set this to False, you have to import the debug function whenever you want to use it as follows:

from inspector_panel import debug

Use

By Importing It

Just import the debug function:

from inspector_panel import debug

and use it to debug whatever you want:

debug([1, 2, 3])
debug(Poll)
debug(Poll.objects.all())

def my_function():
    print "Hello World"

debug(my_function)

Optionally you can disable console logging:

debug([1, 2, 3], console=False)

Without Importing

After you set DEBUG_INSPECTOR_PANEL_EXTEND_BUILTINS to True, you no longer need to import a function to use dj_debug. You can simply use it whenver you want:

dj_debug([1, 2, 3])
dj_debug(Poll)
dj_debug(Poll.objects.all())

def my_function():
    print "Hello World"

dj_debug(my_function)

Important!

This panel is NOT a replacement for other more complete tools as python logging and pdb.

License

See LICENSE on project root.