This section of the documentation presents detailed information describing how you debug your
.NET COBOL applications that are running in containers.
Note:
- The information in this topic applies to both native COBOL and
.NET COBOL applications unless specifically indicated. If you want to use native COBOL in containers, however,
Micro Focus recommends using the IDE-based functionality described in
Debugging and Running Native COBOL Applications in Containers as it offers an fully-integrated, easy-to-use debugging experience.
To debug a containerized COBOL application you use
Visual COBOL's remote debugging features. Remote debugging is not a technique specifically for containerized COBOL applications, and information
on remote debugging in general is covered elsewhere in this documentation. See
Remote Debugging of Native COBOL Applications
for more information.
This section of the documentation covers information on remote debugging that is specifically related to containerized COBOL
applications.
As described in
Key Concepts When Using Containers for COBOL Application Development, there are two ways in which you can debug a COBOL application running in a container:
- Running the
Visual COBOL base image and making the application's executable and debug files available using a volume mount.
- Building and running an application-specific image that contains the
Visual COBOL base image as well as the application's executable and debug files.
This section of the documentation assumes that you are using the first of these approaches, although the majority of the steps
involved are the same for both approaches.
The process for debugging a COBOL application running in a container is as follows:
- Build the application (for debug) on the host computer using
Visual COBOL.
- Run the
Visual COBOL base image, making sure that you volume mount the directory containing the application's executable and debug files that
you built in step 1.
- Find out the ID or IP address of the container.
- Start debugging remotely as you would normally (in a non-containerized environment), specifying the ID or IP address of the
container to establish a connection between the debugger and the containerized application.
The following sections contain more information on each of these steps.