[Solved]-PyCharm remote debugging – connects but can't start debugging

For future googlers … I was able to get remote debugging working, but not via this method. I just answered a similar question about this over on the pycharm forums so thought I’d update this question with the method that did work for me.

1. Go to “PyCharm/Preferences/Project Interpreter”.
   • You’ll see an option to choose which python interpreter at the top of the dialog. Next to that is a gear icon. If you click on the gear icon, you’ll see an option to “Add remote” … you give it ssh credentials (or path to ssh keys) and the path to where your python interpreter is installed on the remote server (i.e., /usr/local/bin/python).
   • In addition, the “pycharm helpers path” for me was (/home/<username>/.pycharm_helpers — I can’t remember if this was created automatically or not).

2. Go to “Run / Edit Configurations…” and add a “Django Server” (plus sign at top left of dialog).

   • Choose your new remote python interpreter as the interpreter to use (it should show up in a drop-down list of choices).
   • In the “env vars” section I needed to specify my main app settings file (i.e., DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE = <app>/settings.py). For my purposes I also needed to set HTTPS=1.
   • Set the working directory to wherever your django project is on the remote server (i.e., /home/<username>/<xyz>/<appdir>).

   • Set the path mappings from your local dir to the remote dir (i.e., /Users/JohnQ/<xyz>/<appdir>=/home/<username>/<xyz>/<appdir>).

   • Because I needed other 3rd party servers (like FB, etc.) to be able to hit this server using HTTPS, I used “stunnel” on my remote server – it was pretty easy to set up).

3. In addition to this, a handy thing to do is set up deployment confirmation as well so that you can just right-click to upload newer versions of your file (under “Tools / Deployment / Configurations…”).

   • Create a new one and under connection just use ssh creds or path to your keys.
   • In the mappings tab, the paths are the same as what you did for the path mappings for the remote server setup.
   • “Web path on server” was just “/” for me. After you create it, you should just be able to right-click on any file/dir and choose “Upload to…”. Note that for an initial upload I just scp’d a tar.gz up to my server to save time and I only upload via the deployment configuration for the changes I do during debugging.

I have been happily using this for remote debugging for ~4 mos., so it works fine.

I had the same symptoms and “fixed” it by turning off all Python Exception Breakpoints in the View Breakpoints window.

For me, dropping the suspend=False parameter did it.

The docs say @param suspend: whether a breakpoint should be emulated as soon as this function is called..

If you let it there, it’s connecting, but not considering the breakpoint. You should then basically use another pydevd.settrace('ip.addr') ->notice no suspend

I had to disable the auto-reloader to fix this:

./manage.py runserver --noreload