Interactive shell to a running Python process

https://github.com/amoffat/Inspect-Shell

by daenz • 15 years ago

146 22 15 years ago

Peaker• 15 years ago

You can also run an RPyC* server in your process, and connect to it from any Python shell on any computer to control it.

* http://rpyc.sourceforge.net/

sidharth• 15 years ago

This is great I thought Ipython was great. But this is awesome.

cmsj• 15 years ago

My most excellent friend Thomas Hurst implemented a remote python shell a few years ago, for use in debugging running instances of Terminator. You can see the code in question here:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~gnome-terminator/terminator/tru...

and how it gets set up, starting at line 88, here:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~gnome-terminator/terminator/tru...

thelastnode• 15 years ago

What are the consequences of running this in production? What's the performance hit like, is it unsafe, etc.?

anonymoushn• 15 years ago

We've been using rfoo to do this. It doesn't seem to impact performance when you're not using it. When you are using it, it's unsafe if you do unsafe things. We primarily use it for debugging by passively inspecting the messed-up portion of the server's state.

masklinn• 15 years ago

> is it unsafe, etc.?

As the readme notes, it's completely unsafe if you perform any mutation operation.

As to the performance hit, I'd expect almost none when not in use for long-running processes: it spawns a thread, and that thread will then wait on a socket accept, no connection, no resources spent. You'll still be paying in memory for the server thread, but that's it (the server thread only creates two objects, an rlcompleter.Completer instance and a function).

storborg• 15 years ago

Would it be possible to use gdb or something similar to inject this into a running process?

jeremya• 15 years ago

Yes, pyrasite does just that with a python wrapper around the gdb commands.

https://fedorahosted.org/pyrasite/

It was discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3014484

mixmastamyk• 15 years ago

See the albertzeyer comment.

albertzeyer2• 15 years ago

If you want to do the same without modifying the script (or if you have the script already running without the needed import for the remote debugging possibility), i.e. inject into a running process:

https://github.com/albertz/pydbattach

politician• 15 years ago

I wanted something like this back in the day to be able to poke around in the EVE Online client. Nice job!

jphackworth• 15 years ago

Very interesting. I would love to see this for other programming languages, especially Ruby (probably fairly easy) or Objective-C (may be quite hard).

albertzeyer2• 15 years ago

For ObjC:

https://github.com/albertz/Pyjector (and then access the ObjC runtime via the Python ObjC bridge)

https://github.com/albertz/FScriptAnywhereSIMBL

saurik• 15 years ago

Or Cycript, which all of us iOS hackers use. ;P

http://www.cycript.org/ http://iphonedevwiki.net/index.php/Cycript

Xuzz• 15 years ago

Objective-C also has Cycript at http://cycript.org/, which has a hybrid syntax of JavaScript and Objective-C and supports injecting into any running process.b

mcantelon• 15 years ago

It's dead easy in Node using the REPL module (http://nodejs.org/docs/v0.6.5/api/repl.html). I've used this to debug weird async issues.

rue• 15 years ago

Ruby's had the much more featureful Pry for some time now: http://github.com/pry/pry.

(And there have been various projects to provide some sub-capabilities for years.)

Maven911• 15 years ago

Id like to see it in bash, all i know now is to use the +x option but you need to do it before its run

draegtun• 15 years ago

With Perl you would use Enbugger & gdb using these instructions: https://metacpan.org/module/Enbugger#From-gdb

teyc• 15 years ago

Zope has this facility and boy it was useful for troubleshooting live systems.

kra• 15 years ago

And Twisted has Manhole, but for some reason we were never allowed to enable it on production deployments...

swdunlop• 15 years ago

I use ipython's "ipdb" or plain old Python "pdb" for the same functionality, and a bit more -- people don't seem to realize that ipdb gives them a full-on REPL within the calling context.

I usually wrap it into our error logging functions, so an environment variable enables debugging where I would normally have a catch-all -- very handy when looking for heisenbugs in AndBug.

AntiLog -- https://gist.github.com/a256ed1295619fad7cfc

AndBug -- https://github.com/swdunlop/andbug

Interactive shell to a running Python process

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