# Debugging

A few tips for debugging your casper scripts:

- Use the verbose mode
- Hook in the deep using events
- Dump serialized values to the console
- Localize yourself in modules
- Name your closures

## Use the verbose mode

By default & by design, a `Casper` instance won’t print anything to the console. This can be very limitating & frustrating when creating or debugging scripts, so a good practice is to always start coding a script using these settings:

    var casper = require('casper').create({
        verbose: true,
        logLevel: "debug"
    });

The `verbose` setting will tell Casper to write every logged message at the `logLevel` logging level onto the standard output, so you’ll be able to trace every step made.

Warning

Output will then be pretty verbose, and will potentially display sensitive informations onto the console. Use with care on production.

## Hook in the deep using events

Events are a very powerful features of CasperJS, and you should probably give it a look if you haven’t already.

Some interesting events you may eventually use to debug your scripts:

- The `http.status.XXX` event will be emitted everytime a resource is sent with the HTTP code corresponding to `XXX`;
- The `remote.alert` everytime an `alert()` call is performed client-side;
- `remote.message` everytime a message is sent to the client-side console;
- `step.added` everytime a step is added to the stack;
- etc…

Listening to an event is dead easy:

    casper.on('http.status.404', function(resource) {
        this.log('Hey, this one is 404: ' + resource.url, 'warning');
    });

Ensure to check the full list of all the other available events.

## Dump serialized values to the console

Sometimes it’s helpful to inspect a variable, especially Object contents. The utils_dump() function can achieve just that:

    require('utils').dump({
        foo: {
            bar: 42
        },
    });

Note

utils_dump() won’t be able to serialize function nor complex cyclic structures though.

## Localize yourself in modules

Warning

Deprecated since version 1.1.

As of 1.1, CasperJS uses PhantomJS’ builtin require and won’t expose the __file__ variable anymore.

If you’re creating Casper modules, a cool thing to know is that there’s a special built-in variable available in every module, `__file__`, which contains the absolute path to current javascript file (the module file).

## Name your closures

Probably one of the most easy but effective best practice, always name your closures:

Hard to track:

    casper.start('http://foo.bar/', function() {
        this.evaluate(function() {
            // ...
        });
    });

Easier:

    casper.start('http://foo.bar/', function afterStart() {
        this.evaluate(function evaluateStuffAfterStart() {
            // ...
        });
    });

That way, everytime one is failing, its name will be printed out in the stack trace, so you can more easily locate it within your code.

Note

This one also applies for all your other Javascript works, of course ;)