tauri-debugging_skill

Overview

This skill helps developers debug Tauri v2 applications across VS Code, RustRover/IntelliJ, and Neovim, and explains console inspection, WebView DevTools, Rust backtraces, and CrabNebula DevTools integration. It focuses on practical launch configurations, development-only code guards, and workflows to get breakpoints, logs, and performance data quickly. Followable steps cover IDE setup, DAP integration, and safe devtools usage.

How this skill works

The skill shows how to enable development-only code paths and print or inspect runtime state from Rust and the WebView. It details enabling RUST_BACKTRACE for full backtraces, programmatically opening DevTools, and adding CrabNebula DevTools for live instrumentation. For each IDE it provides the necessary launch or DAP configurations and task setups so the frontend dev server and Rust runtime run together and the debugger can attach.

When to use it

• When breakpoints in Rust are not being hit and you need proper launch configuration
• When you need detailed stack traces or variable inspection for panics and errors
• When the WebView frontend is not loading or you need to inspect DOM/console messages
• When you want real-time logging, IPC tracing, and performance spans via CrabNebula DevTools
• When integrating Neovim debugging with nvim-dap and codelldb for a terminal workflow

Best practices

• Use conditional compilation (cfg(dev) or debug_assertions) to keep debug code out of production
• Start the frontend dev server before launching the Tauri app; use preLaunchTask or a task runner
• Enable RUST_BACKTRACE=1 when reproducing panics to get full backtraces
• Prefer cppvsdbg on Windows for richer enum and formatting support in VS Code
• Only add devtools features or plugins in debug builds; avoid shipping private macOS APIs

Example use cases

• Configure VS Code launch.json and tasks.json to run the UI dev server and attach lldb to the Rust binary
• Set up RustRover run configurations: an npm/pnpm dev server config plus a Cargo run with --no-default-features
• Add tauri-plugin-devtools and initialize it in main.rs conditionally to inspect IPC commands and logs
• Install codelldb and configure nvim-dap in Neovim, adding keymaps and dapui auto-open behavior
• Programmatically open WebView DevTools during development to inspect DOM and JS console output