Collecting debug information
04 Jul 2024I work in a team with many colleagues where we are responsible for several code bases. Often if someone has an issue with running a project you end up either assuming you’ll have the same environment and forget to ask or spend time probing for details about the person’s system. I think this is an ideal case for putting a small script in your project that will collect information that will be generally useful for helping debug project level issues.
For example on an iOS project I might have a script like this as a starting point
bin/collect-debug-info
#!/bin/bash
cat << EOF
OS: $(sw_vers --productName) $(sw_vers --productVersion) ($(sw_vers --buildVersion))
Git: $(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD) ($(git rev-parse HEAD))
Xcode: $(xcode-select -p)
Simulators:
$(xcrun simctl list devices booted)
Mise $(mise --version):
$(mise list --current)
EOF
An example output might be:
OS: macOS 14.3.1 (23D60)
Git: main (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa)
Xcode: /Applications/Xcode-15.4.0.app/Contents/Developer
Simulators:
== Devices ==
-- iOS 16.4 --
-- iOS 17.0 --
-- iOS 17.0 --
-- iOS 17.2 --
-- iOS 17.4 --
-- iOS 17.5 --
iPhone 11 (AAAAAAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAAAAAAAAAAE) (Booted)
Mise 2024.7.0 macos-arm64 (e518900 2024-07-03):
jq 1.7.1 ~/src/ios/my-proj/.mise.toml latest
ruby 3.3.0 ~/src/ios/my-proj/.mise.toml 3.3.0
swiftformat 0.53.9 ~/src/ios/my-proj/.mise.toml 0.53.9
swiftlint 0.55.0 ~/src/ios/my-proj/.mise.toml 0.55.0
tuist 4.17.0 ~/src/ios/my-proj/.mise.toml 4.17.0
xcodes 1.4.1 ~/src/ios/my-proj/.mise.toml 1.4.1
Now when someone asks for help and I suspect there might be environment issues I can just ask for the output of bin/collect-debug-info and we’ll be up to speed debugging in no time.
This is the kind of script you can build up over time and add all kinds of useful info as and when you decide it would be useful to collect.