Yet Another Cordova/PhoneGap Debugging Tip

Want another way to debug Cordova/PhoneGap apps? This isn't new, but I tend to forget about this option and it came in handy yesterday so I thought I would share. When you send builds to the simulator/device via the command line, you may notice that at the end of all the output about building this and generating that, you get these two lines:

2014-07-14 17:23:36.846 ios-sim[1335:507] stderrPath: /Users/ray/readtextfile/platforms/ios/cordova/console.log
2014-07-14 17:23:36.847 ios-sim[1335:507] stdoutPath: /Users/ray/readtextfile/platforms/ios/cordova/console.log

What this is telling you is that you have a log file that will report on errors from your application. This also includes console.log output. (As well as console.dir.) If you simply tail -f this file in another terminal tab (and yes, you get tail -f in Windows too with the right download), you get your console output as plain text right in your terminal. Here is an example from what I was working on yesterday.

Edit on July 16: As just an FYI, when I just tested this on a new app this morning, it did not work. I had to add the Console plugin. My initial test was with a Ionic app where this was added automatically.