How to Debug an Angular Application With Chrome and VS Code

In this post, I want to show you how to debug an Angular application with Chrome and VS Code.

First of all, you need to install the extension in VS Code.

You can find it here or search in the extensions tab for the plugin directly:

After installing, you probably have to enable the plugin and restart VS Code, but in the end you will see your folder structure like normal. Then, head over to the debug tab and press the button for creating you an new configuration and select the “Chrome” environment.

After doing this, the extension created a new folder (if you do not have it already) called “.vscode” with a “launch.json” in it, initially looking like this:

{ "version": "0.2.0", "configurations": [ { "name": "Launch Chrome against localhost, with sourcemaps", "type": "chrome", "request": "launch", "url": "http://localhost:8080", "sourceMaps": true, "webRoot": "${workspaceRoot}" }, { "name": "Attach to Chrome, with sourcemaps", "type": "chrome", "request": "attach", "port": 9222, "sourceMaps": true, "webRoot": "${workspaceRoot}" } ] }

Our folder structure tells us that the files are served from the root.

So, the "webRoot”: “${workspaceRoot}”” setting is good to go for us. We will open a new Chrome instance but it needs an existing running server. So, if you use something like lite-server, you can easily type “lite-server” at the root of your web application or place it in your NPM command chain in the “NPM Start” command. This is what I did.

Before we go, we need to adjust the URLs where the server is running and the URL where the Chrome instance is starting.

So, replace the port in the config file with the port from your lite-server. In my case, that's “3000.” 

Then, start the lite server and just hit “play.”

Chrome starts and you can debug your page in VS Code. Of course, you can also configure Chrome to attach directly. See here for examples.