Vscode Turborepo Jest Debugging

Updated:
2 min read

Turborepo is a great tool for managing monorepos, but it's a lot of configuration.

One common workflow for debugging tests is to use the VSCode debugger to attach to the test runner. All available documentation online assumes that jest is installed at the root of the project. This goes against the default recommendations of turborepo which suggests to install and configure jest in each package.

The following is what they all recommend. Here we use the jest package in the root of the project. VSCode provides a way to match the root of the vscode project, but no way to match the current monorepo package. This is a problem because we could be on different versions of jest in different packages and have wildly different configurations.

./vscode/launch.json
{
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Debug Current Test File",
            "type": "node",
            "request": "launch",
            "skipFiles": ["<node_internals>/**"],
            "program": "${workspaceFolder}/node_modules/jest/bin/jest",
            "args": ["--runInBand", "--testPathPattern", "${relativeFile}"],
            "cwd": "${workspaceRoot}",
            "console": "integratedTerminal",
            "internalConsoleOptions": "neverOpen",
            "autoAttachChildProcesses": true,
            "protocol": "inspector",
            "showAsyncStacks": true,
        },
    ]
}

To fix this we can write our own program that will find the closes package dir and instead run tests from there.

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
 
const [, , ...args] = process.argv;
const file = args[2];
 
function findClosestPackageDir(file) {
    const dir = path.dirname(file);
    const packageJson = path.join(dir, 'package.json');
 
    if (fs.existsSync(packageJson)) {
        return dir;
    }
 
    return findClosestPackageDir(dir);
}
 
const packageDir = findClosestPackageDir(file);
 
process.chdir(packageDir);
 
require('child_process').spawnSync('pnpm', ['jest', ...args], {
    stdio: 'inherit',
});

Now all we need to do is update the program in the launch.json file.

./vscode/launch.json
{
    "configurations": [
        {
            // ...
            "program": "${workspaceFolder}/scripts/debug-test.js",
        },
    ]
}

Now when we try to debug a test it will run from the closest package dir, using the jest executable for the package as well as it's unique configuration.