Node Cookbook - Third Edition

Using node-inspector with older Node versions

The --inspect flag and protocol were introduced in Node 6.3.0, primarily because the V8 engine had changed the debugging protocol. In Node 6.2.0 and down, there's a legacy debugging protocol enabled with the --debug flag, but this isn't compatible with the native Chrome Devtools UI.

Instead, we can use the node-inspector tool, as a client for the legacy protocol.

The node-inspector tool essentially wraps an older version of Devtools that interfaces with the legacy debug API, and then hosts it locally.

Let's install node-inspector:

$ npm i -g node-inspector

This will add a global executable called node-debug, which we can use as shorthand to start our process in debug mode.

If we could run our ...