ClickHouse tips #2: Debugging ClickHouse on Visual Studio Code

It’s possible to debug ClickHouse on VSCode. These are the steps to do it:

• Build ClickHouse for debugging docs
• You can adapt the build with several flags, in my case I want to disable jemalloc:

• Doing ninja clickhouse-server clickhouse-client the whole process takes less than one hour.

And then to debug with Visual Studio Code:

• Install the C++ extension (and gdb from brew or apt)
• Create a new run config like this in .vscode:

Then you can just add breakpoints in any line in the editor and RUN from inside Visual Studio Code.

After doing any change in a cpp file, you can just recompile it, although there might be better ways to do this (let us know!). There’s a compile_commands.json file in the build folder with the commands and then call ninja to re-generate the clickhouse binary (it’ll just recompile the dependencies)

That’s it!