How to do it…

How it works…

Given that we haven't written any line of code yet, we won't call ipdb from inside the (non-existing) code. What we need to know is that by adding these lines anywhere in the code, we will get the prompt from the improved debugger:

import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()

But we do have a Plone site running, so let's try to get an IPython shell on demand. Access http://localhost:8080/plone/ipdb and go to your foreground console.

There will be an ipdb prompt waiting for you. Use the ll command (double "L" in lowercase) to get a list of local variables. Then test some other things: context, is the object we called ipdb from, in our example, the Plone site. In this particular case, it also happens to be the portal variable.