Debugging Solidity Smart Contracts

 

The console debugger, or ConsoleDebugTracer as it’s also called, allows you to step into the details of what’s going on when you deploy and interact with a smart contract. While initially we only supported showing you the low-level opcodes and the stack, we’ve been working on extending this to also include the Solidity source code. As of release 4.5.12, this is generally available. 

 

The above demo is showing many of the features of our debugger. Here’s how you’d do this locally from your terminal:

$ git clone https://github.com/web3j/web3j-evmexample.git
$ cd web3j-evmexample
$ ./gradlew --console=plain clean build run

When running gradlew you’re starting the main Demo class. Because the project is configured to use our solidity gradle plugin, it also takes care of compiling all the Solidity contracts. As the demo starts you’ll be brought in to the console debugger and we’ll set up a breakpoint:

: break Greeter.sol 13

With that added we can do the next command to skip through the first two transactions.

: next
: next

At this point, you will see “Greeter was deployed, about to get greeting..” on the console. We’re now entering the transaction that will fetch the greeting. The function that gives us this greeting happens to be located around line 13 in the Greeter.sol contract, where we added out breakpoint earlier. Doing next now will bring us there.

: next

At this point, you’ll notice a lot of low-level opcodes and some stack details. We hide these with the hide command.

: hide opcodes
: hide stack

We can always get them back using the show commands. Other options are also available, as shown when you use the help command. We are also interested in getting your feedback about the debugger, what works and what’s missing, and encourage you to join the discussions.