Improvement : document how to debug a native provider with delve

[rouemma1]

Problem description

• I had trouble finding the information that I needed: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/resources/

Documentation of Pulumi doesn't cover how to attach a debugger to a running native provider written in Go. Being able to hook a debugger is mandatory during bug reproduction and problem diagnostic, or even to learn how to write native providers and inspect what a resource provider is expected to do.

Suggestions for a fix

Here's how to were able to achieve this.

It is possible to debug a Pulumi resource provider in Go using the PULUMI_DEBUG_PROVIDERS environment variable which tells Pulumi to use a provider that is already started. The format of the value to be supplied is: "providername:port,otherProvider:port". Note that the service port is returned when a provider is started.

Debugging with VS Code

From VS Code, it is possible to add a runtime configuration in the launch.json file to use Delve, the Go debugger.

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Attach to Process",
            "type": "go",
            "request": "attach",
            "mode": "local",
            "processId": "${command:pickProcess}"
        },
        ...
    ]
}

Alternatively, it is possible to start Delve from the command line or from another IDE.

Disabling optimizations

Ideally one should get better results by compiling the project in debug and passing the following options -gcflags=all="-N -l" in order to disable optimizations so that the debugger is able to return the content of the stack and that function calls are not elided (inline).

References

Details of the Pulumi merge request

Visual Studio Code Golang Support

Visual Studio Code Golang debugging

[susanev]

@mikhailshilkov who is the best person to triage this?

[thomas11]

Thank you for submitting this idea, along with the correct instructions, @rouemma1!

We also have this documented internally in the providers team. It would be a matter of adding the relevant parts to the docs (and identifying to which docs).

[rouemma1]

Thank you very much! Looking forward your version!

[ryan-pip]

Has there been any progress on this documentation? It would also be good to document how to get a native provider running so that we can connect to it, this seems to be missing from the instructions at the top.

[ericrudder]

@interurban can we pls try to knock this one out? thx

[interurban]

Hey@rouemma1 , give these new docs a try and let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.
https://www.pulumi.com/docs/using-pulumi/pulumi-packages/debugging-provider-packages/