Interactively debugging a template with a REPL

I would like to be able to interactively debug a template modification I am trying to make instead of putting puts statements all over the place and trying to reach the proper object.

Using the slim template engine.

In python this would look like this:

- import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()

Then running the program from a shell I would get an interactive debugger in the context of where the line executed.

Ideally the debugger/REPL would have tab completion to make object hierarchy discovery faster.

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NAML

I got this to work by invoking pry directly from the template I was working on. Let me tell you it is a wonderful and powerful way to poke around for someone not familiar with ruby or asciidoctor's core. I was able to implement what I intended to do much more quicker than by going through those huge "sections" printouts (which holds references to @document and so would scroll forever).

I documented the approach here: https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-reveal.js/blob/master/HACKING.adoc#interactively-debug-a-template

Let me stress out how awesome this is for a non-rubyist nor asciidoctor contributor like me: It takes literally 2 minutes to setup and then I could do stuff like `(subsections = sections).empty?` (and understand what it meant, assignment or test!? oh both...) or `? find_by` which pulls out nicely formatted documentation of asciidoctor's AbstractBlock's find_by without me needing to hunt for where the source code was (was doing that before). When you quit the debugger, the processing resumes and debugger will fire again if the `binding.pry` is encountered again otherwise process completes with a rendered document. Marvellous.

Feel free to copy the stuff and improve this documentation as you see fit.

Cheers

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NAML