Installing Weinre and getting it going on a mac

Introduction

Hi following on from a recent blog post regarding getting phonegap/cordova and sencha 2 working nicely together, I thought it may be prudent to do another blog regarding the debugging of these using weinre which is just awesome.  So here goes....

for this we are using Mac os.

Downloading Weinre

Start by downloading the weinre application from :

http://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/builds/

(thanks to Kerri Shotts on the phonegap forum for this link, much appreciated !)

I went to the 1.x directory and got the latest 1.6 zip file

so unzip the files to the directory of your choice.

Server.Properties

OK i'm a bit of a muppet when it comes to MAC OS as I have been a windows developer all my life (sorry guys but Visual studio really is a lot easier to use but thats my humble opinion) but one thing that had me puzelled and it was down to my lack of understanding of MAC OS.  We need to create a server.properties file under root/.weinre.  before we do this, do yourself a favour and open a terminal and show all hidden files like so:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Then kill all finder apps:

killall Finder

And when you open finder again, under yourmacname/users you will find the .weinre directory.

The server.properties file contains which ipaddress are used to communicate with the simulator and weinre.  If you need to find the ipaddress of your machine, open a terminal type ifconfig which will give you your ipaddress.

ok, create your server.properties file in the .weinre directory, with the following:

boundHost: 192.168.1.3

httpPort:  8080

and save.  Start weinre and you should be able to navigate to:

http://youripaddress:8080/target/target-script-min.js

and view the file.

Debugging 

Ok, time for a test drive. I have an XCode project which i run in the simulator.  So start Weinre and then run your XCode project in the simulator.

I get white list errors.  So go to your project directory and find the plist file for your application:

Open this with XCode and you will see a external hosts entry, add your ip address to this list :

After this, start weinre if not started then your simulator.  You should now be able to use the debugger and set stuff in weinre and these are reflected in the simulator ! have fun !