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Comment by ahepp | Hacker News Reader

Did you ever find a satisfying solution? I am trying to make more effective use of docker for development and anticipate needing GDB at some point.

I imagine one could install GDB in the container and connect to it remotely? Or from the container's shell?

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Ignoring VSCode's insanely fragile config for this, any debugger with a remote protocol tends to work. Personally I have better luck manually setting up a headless GDB session and connecting with intellij, but it's also difficult sometimes.

Since the remote stuff is sometimes an incredible pain to set up and use, I usually install gdb and just use its CLI in the container. That's usually trivial in comparison, and it's a decent skill to learn regardless since so many debuggers use a similar CLI UX. It's extremely cross-platform and cross-language, so you can just jump on a new thing and be a wizard from day 1.

For node / php and python I just expose the debugger ports in docker, and if I'm running docker in a VM I just forward them over SSH. VSCode connects to the forwarded port easily, but sometimes you have to struggle with workspace / source mapping and other issues (like connecting to child processes).

I was eventually able to get it to work by digging through a lot of old GitHub issue discussions. Sadly it was so flaky and slow that I just threw out Docker for development after awhile.

IIRC, you just need to install gdb when you build your image and use `docker run -it bash` to run any shell commands in your container

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