Attach to process

RustRover provides a way to attach the debugger to local processes. You can attach to Rust processes with GDB or MSVC LLDB on Windows, LLDB on macOS, and both GDB and LLDB on Linux. When applicable, debuggers for other languages (for example, Python debugger) can be used as well.

Prerequisites for Ubuntu

On Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions, you might get the ptrace: Operation not permitted error message upon the first attempt to attach to a process. Do one of the following:

To disable this restriction temporarily, enter the command:
echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope
To disable this restriction permanently, open the /etc/sysctl.d/10-ptrace.conf file for editing and change the line kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 1 to kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 0.
To apply the changes immediately, enter the above command echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope.
Alternatively, run sudo service procps restart or restart your system.

You can find more details here.

Attach to a process

Press Ctrl+Alt+F5 or select Run | Attach to Process from the main menu.
The Attach to Process dialog opens the list of all the detected running processes.
You can view the processes as a list or as a tree and search for a particular process by name:
For each process, you can find the executable name and process ID, the user that launched it, the available debuggers, and the command used for launching.
Use the drop-down menu to filter the list of processes by the type of the debugger:
You can also filter the list by setting Show only my processes:
Select the process and click Attach with....
On Linux, you can select the preferred debugger from the drop-down list. For other OS, the debugger is predefined. For more information, refer to Debugger options.
Proceed with debugging the same way you usually do it in RustRover (set breakpoints, step through, pause and resume the process, evaluate expressions, and so on).
In case the process you have attached to does not provide debug information, breakpoints will be unavailable and stepping will be performed in the disassembly view.

Detach from a process

The procedure of detaching from a process is the same as for stopping a debug session. However, note that when you detach, the debug session closes but the process continues to run.

Click the Stop button on the main toolbar in the Debug tool window.
Alternatively, click Stop on the main toolbar or press Ctrl+F2, then select the session to be closed.

Last modified: 20 January 2025