JSP debugging in IntelliJ IDEA

by

For JSP debugging in Intellij there are some configurations that must be in order. The fact that Intellij always allows you to add a breakpoint on a JSP line does not necessarily imply that you’ve configured JSP debugging. In the following I refer to Intellij 8 configuration, w.r.t. previous versions you will need to do similar operations as the concepts are the same.

In order to enable JSP debugging you must do two steps: set a web application configuration in your project and add a web application server configuration.

Web application Configuration: in order to have JSP debugging, you must have a “web” facet in your project structure, pointing to the correct web.xml file. Depending on the kind of web application structure you are using, the facet may be detected automatically by Intellij (go anyway to check what it has done) or you may have to add it manually. Remember in the “Java EE build settings” tab to set as anable “Create web facet exploded directory”; if you don’t want duplications, a trick is just to enable it and point to your already existing directory.

(Web) Application server: Go to “edit configurations”, there you have to add to configurations an application server, not launch the web server as an application like any other. In this way Intellij will be able to intercept JSP calls. In the list of application servers, you should have the default one, Tomcat. Be sure to have a local Tomcat installation before you do this, and point to that when adding the web application server. The last trick is going to the “Deployment” tab and selecting as “Deployment source” the same facet that you configured in the previous step.

The same configuration works if you want to use another web application server, I tested it with the latest Caucho Resin releases and debugging works fine (it didn’t with the previous Intellij and Resin combinations).

If you don’t see Tomcat in the list of available application servers to add, check the plugins in the general Intellij settings pane: in the latest releases, more and more functionality has become “pluggable”, and even very basic functions may be disabled; this plugin is called “Tomcat integration”.

Finally, it is surely not true that JSP files need to be under WEB-INF to be under debugging.

More Related Contents:

  1. Attach IntelliJ IDEA debugger to a running Java process
  2. Step through JDK source code in IntelliJ IDEA
  3. What is a debugger and how can it help me diagnose problems?
  4. Accessing console and devtools of extension’s background.js
  5. In Visual Studio C++, what are the memory allocation representations?
  6. How can I test a trigger function in GAS?
  7. ERROR 1066: Unable to open iterator for alias in Pig, Generic solution
  8. What is private bytes, virtual bytes, working set?
  9. What are the debug memory fill patterns in Visual Studio C++ and Windows?
  10. How do I see the expanded macro code that’s causing my compile error?
  11. How do I debug an MPI program?
  12. Deciphering variable information while debugging Java
  13. How to see which plugins are making Vim slow?
  14. How is Linux kernel live debugging done and what tools are used?
  15. How do I skip external code when debugging in VS Code
  16. Debugging in Clojure? [closed]
  17. What flags do you set for your GFORTRAN debugger/compiler to catch faulty code?
  18. How to get R script line numbers at error?
  19. Cannot set Java breakpoint in Intellij IDEA
  20. Visual Studio 2015 Debugging: Can’t expand local variables?
  21. How to debug Greasemonkey script with the Firebug extension?
  22. How do I debug a stand-alone VBScript script?
  23. How to debug Node.JS child forked process?
  24. How to check release / debug builds using cfg in Rust?
  25. How to set level logging to DEBUG in Tomcat?
  26. Functions debugging in VS Code
  27. Getting the state of variables after an error occurs in R
  28. Watch a variable (memory address) change in Linux kernel, and print stack trace when it changes?
  29. Chrome Typescript debugging references wrong ‘this’
  30. how to access Angular2 component specific data in console?

Leave a Comment