Akash Babu AkashBabu

Debugging ES6 in VS Code

My current editor of choice for all things related to Javascript and Node is VS Code, which I highly recommend. The other day I needed to hunt down a bug in one of my tests written in ES6, which at time of writing is not fully supported in Node. Shortly after, I found myself down the rabbit hole of debugging in VS Code and realized this isn't as straightforward as I thought initially. This short post summarizes the steps I took to make debugging ES6 in VS Code frictionless.

What doesn't work

My first approach was a launch configuration in launch.json mimicking tape -r babel-register ./path/to/testfile.js with babel configured to create inline sourcemaps in my package.json. The debugging started but breakpoints and stepping through the code in VS Code were a complete mess. Apparently, ad-hoc transpilation via babel-require-hook and inline sourcemaps do not work in VS Code. The same result for attaching (instead of launch) to `babel-node

	[{
	"id": 1,
	"name": "Afghanistan",
	"isoAlpha2": "AF",
	"isoAlpha3": "AFG",
	"isoNumeric": 4,
	"currency": {
	"code": "AFN",
	"name": "Afghani",
	"symbol": "؋"