I work for Mozilla, and we’re working on an internal tool to help us manage our repository (tree) tests.  We use a Vagrant environment to run the service (back-end) portion and the front-end is written in Angular.js.  The project is called Treeherder.

I love using PyCharm, and love the debugger, and wanted to debug some code on the service.  I ran into a few hiccups with it, but now have it working.  Here’s how I did it.

Firstly, credit where credit is due:

• This was the first post I used to get going.  An excellent starting place.
• And, of course, the docs helped a bit
• And help from my friend at Mozilla, Ed Morley.  He mentioned that I needed to manually enter the environment variables that we have set in the vagrant env at /etc/profile.d/treeherder.sh like this:

After those things, my configuration looked like this:

and my environment variables (which were a bit of a pain to add manually) looked like this:

then for Vagrant setup:

and the remote interpreter:

PyCharm Django settings:

 

Things I ran into

I was getting an error where it couldn’t find ROOT_URLCONF when running.  After adding that to the settings file, it was able to run.  But then I was getting InvalidCacheBackendError.

The issue ended up being that we have a base.py settings file, and then each user has a local.py settings file which extends it.  The “extending” didn’t seem to work.  So I made a new copy of the file called pycharm_django_settings.py in the same folder.  This file was just a copy of all the base.py settings and the local.py settings.  There may be a better way to do this, but this worked for me.

After creating that file, I had to set this for the PyCharm properties | django settings for that project to point to that new file.  But I ALSO had to set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE value above to point to that file.

After that, I was able to run our service in PyCharm and could start debugging!