When I first started creating custom Mistral actions for TripleO, I quickly found the need to debug them interactively.  I wasn’t satisfied with dumping out information to logs and searching through them.  I started with creating scripts that used the same code so I could run them directly, but I soon found that approach inadequate.  I needed to be able to debug an action that used something internal to Mistral (e.g. mistral.context) or when an action is passing a unit test but fails within a workflow execution.   I found myself wanting a solution where you could create a Mistral execution and on any error have it open a pdb session in the shell.

To solve this problem, a coworker suggested remote debugging with pdb.  A quick search led to the Remote PDB package.  It turned out to be quick and simple to use and it worked immediately without a ton of effort.  To use remote-pdb on the undercloud, you need to perform the following steps:

# https://pypi.python.org/pypi/remote-pdb
pip install remote-pdb

# open port for remote-pdb access on undercloud
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 4445 -m comment --comment "remote pdb" -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT

# add two lines to any action you want to debug
from remote_pdb import RemotePdb
RemotePdb('127.0.0.1', 4445).set_trace()

# run action or create exececution
mistral run-action tripleo.get_capabilities '{"container": "overcloud"}'

# open netcat in another terminal on undercloud
nc -C 127.0.0.1 4445