Let's Debug Node.js Applications

The workshop was conducted by Julian Duque, a lead developer advocate at Salesforce, along with Mohith Srivastava, also a lead developer advocate at Salesforce.

The workshop primarily used Chrome Developer Tools and Visual Studio Code for debugging Node.js applications.

The first rule of remote debugging is 'Don't.' It's advised to not expose your debugging port to the public and to use an SSH tunnel for secure access.

The prerequisites include having basic JavaScript and Node.js experience, Node.js LTS version 14 or higher, Heroku CLI, Git, a GitHub account, Google Chrome or Chromium, and optionally Visual Studio Code and Docker.

You can enable debugging mode while your Node.js application is running by sending the USR1 signal to the process ID using the kill command.

You can start the Node.js application in debugging mode using the command 'npm run startdebug,' which enables the V8 inspector protocol and listens on a specified port.

A log point in Chrome Developer Tools allows you to log custom messages to the console without modifying your code, useful for debugging without adding multiple console.log statements.

A memory leak occurs when objects are retained in memory and not released after a garbage collection cycle. It was identified by taking multiple heap snapshots and comparing them to see if memory usage kept increasing.

Some tips include using the USR1 signal to enable debugging on a running application, adding the process ID to your logs, and using log points instead of console.log for logging debug information.

You can perform remote debugging on a Heroku-deployed Node.js application by configuring the proc file to start in debugging mode and using the Heroku CLI command 'heroku ps:forward' to create an SSH tunnel.