We talked quite a bit today about debugging tools in the Ruby Rogues podcast. I recorded this before that episode. Here's a brief introduction on how to use debuggers to find problems in your Rails code.

The basic idea is that your set a breakpoint in your application, which causes the application to stop processing and allow you to access the application's state and step through the methods being called in order to find the cause of your problem.

With the Ruby Debug library, all you need to do is require 'ruby-debug' and call 'debugger' where you want the application to stop.