This section of the documentation presents detailed information describing how you debug your COBOL applications that are
running in Docker containers.
Note:
- The information in this section applies to both native and managed COBOL unless specifically indicated. However, to be able
to debug managed COBOL running in a container you must be using Visual Studio 2017 (or later).
- Most of the debugging functionality described in this section is provided through the Eclipse IDE. As a result, much of the
functionality described in this section does not apply if you are using
Visual COBOL Development Hub as a stand-alone development environment. Where a feature in this section is not available when using
Visual COBOL Development Hub as a stand-alone development environment, that is indicated in the description of the feature.
To debug a containerized COBOL application you use
Visual COBOL's remote debugging features. Remote debugging is not a technique specifically for containerized COBOL applications, and information
on remote debugging in general is covered elsewhere in this documentation. See
Debugging Using a Remote Machine for more information.
This section of the documentation covers information on remote debugging that is specifically related to containerized COBOL
applications.
As described in
Key Concepts When Using Docker for COBOL Application Development, there are two ways in which you can debug a COBOL application running in a container:
- Running the
Visual COBOL base image and making the application's executable and debug files available using a volume mount.
- Building and running an application-specific image that contains the
Visual COBOL base image as well as the application's executable and debug files.
This section of the documentation assumes that you are using the first of these approaches, although the majority of the steps
involved are the same for both approaches.
The process for debugging a COBOL application running in a container is as follows:
- Build the application (for debug) on the host computer using
Visual COBOL.
- Run the
Visual COBOL base image, making sure that you volume mount the directory containing the application's executable and debug files that
you built in step 1.
- Find out the ID or IP address of the container.
- Start debugging remotely as you would normally (in a non-containerized environment), specifying the ID or IP address of the
container to establish a connection between the debugger and the containerized application.
The following sections contain more information on each of these steps.