Debug Server

Karate has first-class debug support based on the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) standard. As of now the Karate Visual Studio Code Extension (created by Kirk Slota) has support for debugging Karate, but we expect support in other IDE-s to be a matter of time.

The Karate Extension takes care of starting a debug session automatically and passing the details of feature files and break-points to the debug server. See video.

The information below is for those who may want to start a debug-server manually and then you can point Visual Studio Code to it by using the following property in your launch configuration - once you have debug support for Karate *.feature files installed.

"debugServer": 4711

Karate CLI

Karate has a Command Line Interface (CLI) by which you can perform some actions without needing to write Java code, and all you need is a *.feature file and other optional Karate artifacts. There are two entry points depending on whether you are using Karate as a Java library or the Standalone JAR.

In both versions of the CLI, the command to start a debug server is -d or --debug and a port number is optional. Besides printing the chosen port to the console, Karate will save a file called karate-debug-port.txt after the server is ready to receive connections - and this will be in the default build directory (typically ./target). This file is designed for IDE-s that run in a different process to be able to start and synchronize debug sessions cleanly.

Standalone JAR

So for the standalone JAR - this will start the debug server on any free port.

java -jar karate.jar -d

Or to force a port:

java -jar karate.jar -d 4711

Classpath

For the standalone-jar, you may need finer control over the classpath, refer to the documentation for more. For example the below adds the "current directory" (.) to the root of the classpath (on linux / mac, for windows - use ; instead of :)

java -cp karate.jar:. com.intuit.karate.Main -d

Maven

When using Karate as a Java library (typically via Maven or Gradle), the "main class" to use is com.intuit.karate.cli.Main. You can directly use it via Maven like this:

mvn test-compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=com.intuit.karate.cli.Main -Dexec.args=-d -Dexec.classpathScope=test

If you are on Windows or run into some problems because of the command-line arguments not being parsed properly, try enclosing the -D sections in quotes:

mvn test-compile exec:java '-Dexec.mainClass=com.intuit.karate.cli.Main' '-Dexec.args=-d' '-Dexec.classpathScope=test'

Gradle

If using Gradle, you can define a task to do this:

task karateDebug(type: JavaExec) {
    classpath = sourceSets.test.runtimeClasspath
    main = 'com.intuit.karate.cli.Main'
}

And with that, on the command-line you can do this:

gradle karate --args="-d" 

Karate Options

The good thing about both CLI Options is that both support the same flags like the Karate Options.

• -t tags
• -T threads
• -n Scenario name
• feature-file or path (directory) as the last parameter
• you can append a line-number (e.g: :30) to the feature-file above if you want to only execute that Scenario (or Scenario Outline row in an Examples table.

What this means is you can debug parallel-execution if you want - which may be useful to troubleshoot problems in large test-suites. VS Code plugin users can create an additional launch configuration and instead of where you see ${file} you can add the details of the tags, threads and feature / paths to execute as the feature property.

        {
            "type": "karate",
            "name": "Karate (debug)",
            "request": "launch",
            "feature": "-t ~@ignore -T 5 classpath:demo/cats",
            "karateCli": "java -jar karate.jar -d"
        }

If you run into problems with VS Code starting the debug server, you can fall back to the last resort - of starting the debug server manually. The nice thing about VS Code is that it supports an extra "debugServer": 4711 property in the above launch-config snippet. And if present, VS Code will completely bypass the plugin when you hit the debug "play" button and will connect to the Karate server directly.