Disable timeouts when running under the debug

[kevindente]

Sometime's I'll be stepping through Node code in the debugger, which obviously draws out test execution time considerably, but Mocha still times out the test after 2 seconds. I've been getting around the problem by using .timeout(0), but it would be sweet if Mocha could detect that the code was running under the debugger (by checking the global.v8debug flag, at least in node) and disable timeouts in that case.

[fakewaffle]

+1

[tj]

hmm yeah I'm down, bit of an edge-case thing but hey

[markstos]

This person also cites timeout-in-debug as an issue:

http://ronderksen.nl/2012/05/03/debugging-mocha-tests-in-webstorm/

[jsdevel]

this just bit me as well

[netpoetica]

Worth noting, for anyone digging into this - the final decision was made to use

--no-timeouts

as the option name vs. --disable-timeouts in the linked commits

[ORESoftware]

don't know about you guys, but I can debug all my code in less than 2 seconds :)

[ORESoftware]

can someone explain here what --no-timeouts does and what it doesn't do? I have:

//package.json

  "scripts": {
    "start": "node ./bin/start.js",
    "test": "mocha test",
    "debug_mocha": "node-debug --no-timeouts _mocha"
  },

it still seems to show errors/warnings with the no-timeouts flag on, but perhaps it doesn't fail the tests before they all are attempted?

[zanemcca]

@ORESoftware I think you need to put the argument on the other side of the _mocha call

    "debug_mocha": "node-debug  _mocha --no-timeouts"

[rulatir]

These solutions are unsatisfactory. We absolutely positively do need an option to automatically disable timeouts if mocha is being run under a debugger.

[netpoetica]

don't know about you guys, but I can debug all my code in less than 2 seconds :)

This is cute if you're thinking about run time and optimization - of course your functions should run quickly. However, if you are debugging, and for example, you are traversing some giant JSON and running find/filter functions on the data sets to poke around in things, then you may timeout. Now, of course, if it is like a response JSON, you can just copy paste into a JSON editor. But, if you are doing something where you are looking at 1 object, deeply, and based on that information, moving into another object somewhere else, deeply again, and following a complicated process like this, then even if your function runs in well under 2s, your debugging process can be quite long. AKA point is moot but nice humblebrag :)