hyprland-wiki/content/Contributing and Debugging/_index.md

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13 Contributing and Debugging

PR, code styling and code FAQs are here

For issues, please see the guidelines

Build in debug mode

Required packages

See manual build for deps.

Install the VSCode C/C++ and CMake Tools extensions and use that.

I've attached a example/launch.json that you can copy to your .vscode/ folder in the repo root.

With that, you can build in debug, go to the debugging tab and hit (gdb) Launch.

note: You probably want to set watchdog_timeout = 0 in the debug {} section of your config. Otherwise Hyprland will notice its hanging when you hit a breakpoint and it will crash after you continue out of it.

Custom, CLI

make debug

Attach and profile in your preferred way.

Meson

meson setup build -Dbuildtype=debug
ninja -C build

Nix

To build the package in debug mode, you have to override it like this:

hyprland.override {
  debug = true;
};

This code can go in the package attribute of the NixOS/Home Manager modules.

Development environment

Setup

Make a copy of your config in ~/.config/hypr called hyprlandd.conf. Debug builds automatically use hyprlandd.conf, but you can also pass --config ~/path/to/conf.conf for an override on release / different file.

  • remove all exec= or exec-once= directives from your config.
  • change default modifier for binds (e.g. SUPER -> ALT)

Launch the dev env

Launch the output Hyprland binary in ./build/ when logged into a Hyprland session.

A new window should open with Hyprland running inside of it. You can now test stuff in the nested session without worrying about nuking your actual session, and also being able to debug it easily. I'd also recommend to launch Hyprland with some sort of a debugger, like gdb. Your IDE (if you use one) can likely do it for you, otherwise gdb ./build/Hyprland should suffice. This will help you debug crashes.

For gdb, when Hyprland crashes, gdb will stop and allow you to inspect the current state with commands like bt, frame, print, etc. An IDE will allow you to do it graphically.

LSP and Formatting

If you want proper LSP support in an editor that doesn't automatically set it up, use clangd. You'll probably notice there will be a bunch of warnings because we haven't generated compile commands, to do this run:

cmake -S . -B build/ -G Ninja -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON

Also, before submitting a PR please format with clang-format, to run this only on your changes run git-clang-format in your projects root directory.

Logs, dumps, etc

You can use the logs and the GDB debugger, but running Hyprland in debug compile as a driver and using it for a while might give more insight to the more random bugs.

When Hyprland crashes, use coredumpctl and then coredumpctl info PID to see the dump. See the instructions below for more info about coredumpctl.

You can also use the amazing command

watch -n 0.1 "grep -v \"arranged\" $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE/hyprland.log | tail -n 40"

for live logs. (replace hyprland with hyprlandd for debug builds)

How do I get a coredump?

See ISSUE_GUIDELINES.md.