Debugging Workers

Debugging is a critical part of developing a new application — whether running code in the initial stages of development, or trying to understand an issue occurring in production. In this article, you will learn how to effectively debug your Workers application, as well as review some code samples to help you get started:

​​ Local testing with wrangler dev

When you are developing your Workers application, the wrangler dev command can significantly reduce the time it takes to test and debug new features. It can help you get feedback quickly while iterating, by easily exposing logs on localhost, and allows you to experiment without deploying to production.

To get started, run wrangler dev in your Workers project directory. The wrangler dev command will deploy your application to the preview service, and make it available for access on localhost:

$ wrangler dev

  Built successfully, built project size is 27 KiB.
  Using namespace for Workers Site "__app-workers_sites_assets_preview"
  Uploading site files
  Listening on http://localhost:8787

[2020-05-28 10:42:33] GET example.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[2020-05-28 10:42:35] GET example.com/static/nav-7cb303.png HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[2020-05-28 10:42:36] GET example.com/sw.js HTTP/1.1 200 OK

In the output above, you can begin to see log lines for the URLs being requested locally.

To help you further debug your code, wrangler dev also supports console.log statements, so you can see output from your application in your local terminal:

index.js
addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  console.log(`Received new request: ${event.request.url}`);
  event.respondWith(handleEvent(event));
});

$ wrangler dev

[2020-05-28 10:42:33] GET example.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Received new request to url: https://example.com/

Inserting console.log lines throughout your code can help you understand the state of your application in various stages until you reach the desired output.

You can customize how wrangler dev works to fit your needs. Refer to the wrangler dev documentation for available configuration options.