Mocha breakpoints using Visual Studio Code

Did you know, that you just go into your launch config, put your cursor after or between your other configs and press ctrl-space to get a current, valid mocha config auto-generated?

Which works perfectly fine for me. Including stopping at breakpoints. ( I also had a prior, now outdated one, that did no longer for various setting-related reasons. )

As of VSCode 1.21.1 (March 2018) this yields:

{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "name": "Mocha (Test single file)",
      "type": "node",
      "request": "launch",
      "runtimeArgs": [
        "${workspaceRoot}/node_modules/.bin/mocha",
        "--inspect-brk",
        "${relativeFile}",
      ],
      "console": "integratedTerminal",
      "internalConsoleOptions": "neverOpen",
      "port": 9229
    }
}

On a side-note: debug-brk is deprectated (for anyone with Node >= Version 8 at least).

If you don't want to use --debug-brk+Attach or state an absolute path to your global mocha installation (which will brake if you keep your launch.json under version control and have multiple developers on different machines), install mocha as a dev dependency and add this to your launch.json:

{
  "name": "mocha",
  "type": "node",
  "request": "launch",
  "program": "${workspaceRoot}/node_modules/mocha/bin/_mocha",
  "stopOnEntry": false,
  "args": ["--no-timeouts", "--colors"], //you can specify paths to specific tests here
  "cwd": "${workspaceRoot}",
  "runtimeExecutable": null,
  "env": {
    "NODE_ENV": "testing"
  }
}

Full debugging support in your tests by just pressing F5.

--no-timeouts makes sure your tests don't time out because you stopped at a breakpoint, and --colors makes sure Mocha outputs colors even though it doesn't detect that VS Code supports colors.