--- title: "ClickHouse® tips #2: Debugging ClickHouse® on Visual Studio Code" excerpt: "How to configure Visual Studio Code to debug ClickHouse® on it. Part 2." authors: "Alberto Romeu" categories: "The Data Base" createdOn: "2023-09-25 00:00:00" publishedOn: "2021-02-10 00:00:00" updatedOn: "2022-09-08 00:00:00" status: "published" ---

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!