Angular is a great front-end framework for web apps. Visual Studio Code is a great source code editor. Their powers combined let you not only develop Angular app code but also debug it through the editor! VS Code debugging even works for TypeScript.

The Basic Guide

To set up debugging, simply follow the steps in the Debugging Angular section of the official Using Angular in VS Code guide. (This guide is really helpful for other VS Code Angular topics, too.) The basic steps are:

1. Make sure VS Code, Google Chrome, and all the Angular parts are already installed.
2. Install the Debugger for Chrome extension in VS Code.
3. Create a launch.json config file (by clicking the gear icon in the Debug view).
4. Set an appropriate config spec in the .vscode/launch.json file (example below).
5. Set breakpoints in the editor.
6. Launch the Angular app separate from the debugger (such as by running “ng serve” from the command line).
7. Run the VS Code debugger “launch” job against the app (by clicking the green arrow in the Debug view).

The launch.json file should look like this, with values changed to reflect your environment:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "type": "chrome",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "Launch Chrome against localhost",
            "url": "http://localhost:4200",
            "webRoot": "${workspaceFolder}"
        },
        {
            "type": "chrome",
            "request": "attach",
            "name": "Attach to Chrome",
            "port": 9222,
            "webRoot": "${workspaceFolder}"
        }
    ]
}

Note that the app must already be running before the debugger is launched! (This point is not entirely clear in the official guide.) The debugger will launch the Google Chrome browser and load the URL provided in the launch.json config. Any time execution hits a breakpoint, execution will stop and let VS Code step through it.

The original guide provides screen shots to better illustrate these steps. Please follow it for more precise steps.

Browser Options

Microsoft publishes the Debugger for Chrome and Debugger for Edge extensions for this sort of debugging. It looks like other non-Microsoft VS Code extensions are available for Firefox, PhantomJS, and Safari on iOS, but the launch.json config looks different.

Debugger Config and Source Control

Typically, it’s a best practice to avoid committing user-specific config files to source control. One user’s settings could conflict with another’s, potentially breaking workspaces. Personally, I would caution against submitting anything in the .vscode directory to source control unless (a) everyone on the team uses VS Code exclusively for the project and (b) the config file entries are usable by everyone on the team.