Because the renderer communicates over a port to the server, you can start a renderer instance in this repo and hack on it.

Yalc vs Yarn Link

The project is setup to use yalc. This means that at the top level directory, yalc publish will send the node package files to the global yalc store. Running yarn in the /spec/dummy/client directory will copy the files from the global yalc store over to the local node_modules directory.

Debugging the Node Renderer

1. cd to the top level of the project.
2. yarn to install any libraries.
3. To compile renderer files on changes, open console and run yarn build:dev.
4. Open another console tab and run RENDERER_LOG_LEVEL=debug yarn start
5. Reload the browser page that causes the renderer issue. You can then update the JS code, and restart the yarn start to run the renderer with the new code.
6. Be sure to restart the rails server if you change any ruby code in loaded gems.
7. Note, the default setup for spec/dummy to reference the pro renderer is to use yalc, which may or may not be using a link, which means that you have to re-run yarn to get the files updated when changing the renderer.
8. Check out the top level nps task nps renderer.debug and spec/dummy/package.json which has script "node-renderer-debug".

Debugging using the Node debugger

1. See this article on setting up the debugger.

Debugging Tape Tests

Using Webstorm

See this article. Be sure to notice the 4th tab for the Debugger Console.

Debugging the Ruby gem

Open the gemfile in the problematic app.

gem "react_on_rails_pro", path: "../../../shakacode/react-on-rails/react_on_rails_pro"

Optionally, also specify react_on_rails to be local:

gem "react_on_rails", path: "../../../shakacode/react-on-rails/react_on_rails"