xvfb-run wrapper for debug scripts

[jordan-schneider]

I run code on headless servers using vscode-remote. Because the server is headless in order to get these scripts to run at all, I have to wrap them in xvfb-run. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell I cannot specify in a launch.json that I want to launch the debug run inside of a xvfb-run call. Is there a way to do this currently? If not, I would appreciate the feature.

Probably it would be best to make this some general ability to wrap debug commands in outer bash commands, which would e.g. enable you to nice your debug script, or isolate it to one core using taskset.

[mch5048]

I agree that that feature would be very helpful for robotics researchers working on the remote servers with graphical simulators.

[int19h]

You can use the "python" setting in launch.json to designate a custom Python interpreter. This can be a shell script that wraps the actual interpreter after setting up the environment as needed - the only requirement is that it should respect the same command line options as regular CPython binary (e.g. by delegating them all).

[mch5048]

@int19h Much appreciate for you for your answer. I'm a bit novice at setting a custom interpreter for the shell script. Could you provide us some pointers for writing such code? It would be a great help!

[int19h]

It depends on your choice of shell. The most basic version for bash should be something like:

#!/bin/bash
python3 "$@"

I'm not familiar with xvfb-run, but it should be straightforward to adapt it to this.

[mch5048]

@int19h
Now I get what you suggest. Thanks for your help!

[UmarSpa]

@mch5048 Can you please share details of your solution?

What changes I need to do in launch.json to debug run inside of a xvfb-run call ?

Edit: Actually I just managed to solve this by using xvfb directly in my script. I used https://github.com/ponty/pyvirtualdisplay/tree/2.1

[mch5048]

@UmarSpa Actually I tried several ideas to do so, but all attempts failed. :(
However, your solution is working for me like a charm! Thank you for sharing it.

[zichunxx]

Hi! Is there any way to change the launch.json to debug inside the xvfb-run call instead of installing pyvirtualdisplay?

[Luoji-0]

Hi, I also meet the problem, and I find runing command "Xvfb :611 -screen 0 1024x768x16 &" and add "DISPLAY=611" to environment variables before starting dubugging can solve the problem, "611" is the server-num,.