I have a windows box and a VM running CentOS. Does anyone happen to know how I can debug a node CLI script (which doesn't open a port) using PHPStorm? The "edit configuration" seems to only support connecting somewhere instead of listening for incoming connections.
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What exactly are you trying to achieve here..?alessioalex– alessioalex2011-12-09 12:46:18 +00:00Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 12:46
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@alessioalex, set the breakpoint, read vars, and such - same as with remote xDebug - I'll set bp in PHPStorm, start listening, use putty to run the node script on the vm and it'll communicate with the IDE to let me do all the useful stuffFluffy– Fluffy2011-12-09 12:51:55 +00:00Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 12:51
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1Another option could be setting up SSH tunnel so that port open on local machine redirects to the port on the remote server.CrazyCoder– CrazyCoder2011-12-09 13:24:16 +00:00Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 13:24
2 Answers
Make sure you have the nodejs plugin installed.
If your server has the balancer package available (my EC2 box didn't), you can use this tutorial to forward the port with balancer.
yum install balance -yt
balance -df 8585 127.0.0.1.5858
Many report success with an iptables redirect from eth0 to lo (didn't work for me) like this:
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp -i eth0 --dport 5858 -j DNAT --to 127.0.0.1:5858
There is also a simple node script described in this eclipse debugging tut (near the bottom), that will tunnel your local debug to a remote host.
But once I was that far down the path, I didn't see the point as I'm familiar with SSH. So ultimately, I went with an SSH tunnel and set up PHPStorm to debug localhost.


2 Comments
For non-Windows users, here is how to setup the port forwarding tunnel using ssh:
ssh -f ssh_user@your-remote-host -L local_port:localhost:port_on_remote -N
This means "ssh to your-remote-host, login as ssh_user. Once there open connection to localhost:port_on_remote and expose this connection at local_port of machine where ssh is run".
The non-obvious piece is you need to use localhost, since Node's debugger only binds itself to localhost ip address (and not to address to which your-remote-host would resolve).
Example with real values:
ssh -f [email protected] -L 5858:localhost:5858 -N
(based on this howto, just took me some time to figure out the localhost piece).