Why doesn't NodeJS debugging work in VSCode?

Question

Experienced developer, but new to VSCode.

The following works for me:

• connecting to a remote server with the Remote-SSH extension
• starting my application on the server (hitting F5 just works)
• seeing the output of my application

The following does not work for me in my project:

• setting breakpoints to pause execution, it says "breakpoint set but not yet bound"

But in a test project it does work, on the same server!

I run the following to initialize a test project:

npm init -y

I then create an index.js, add some test code to it, open the folder in VSCode, set breakpoints, debug and everything works as expected. NOTE I do NOT have to create a launch.json file for this to work! All it apparently needs is my package.json file as generated by npm.

My real project has an identical setup to the test project:

• package.json is identical apart from the project name
• package.json obviously contains some dependencies
• it has way more files than just the index.js, but I don't see how this is relevant

I am at a complete loss why it doesn't work for my real project. Since it works with the test project, it cannot be anything on the server (say firewalls or whatever).

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have tried to google for many, many things, but I cannot find anything that helps.

Answer 1

The answer seems to be related to permissions on my server, although I didn't get any information about that from VSCode. My test project was in my home dir on my server, my real project was not. When I moved my real project into my home dir, debugging worked immediately.

If anyone has any insights about why this stopped debugging from working, but not anything else...? Cause I could edit the files, create new ones, etc. just fine when the project was outside my home dir...