weinre - Home

weinre is WEb INspector REmote.
Pronounced like the word "winery". Or maybe like the word "weiner". Who knows,
really.

weinre is a debugger for web pages, like
FireBug (for FireFox)
and
Web Inspector (for WebKit-based browsers), except it's designed
to work remotely, and in particular, to allow you debug web pages
on a mobile device such as a phone.

Interesting places to visit:

More information on weinre's big brothers, Web Inspector / Google Chrome
Developer Tools, is available at
Google's Chrome Dev Tools pages
and
Apple's Web Inspector pages.

If you aren't familiar with FireBug or Web Inspector,
weinre isn't going to make too much sense to you.
weinre reuses the user interface code from the
Web Inspector project at WebKit,
so if you've used Safari's Web Inspector or Chrome's Developer Tools,
weinre will be very familiar. If you're not
familiar with Web Inspector, the links above to Google's and Apple's documentation
will be useful.

Here's an example session using weinre:

Two screen captures are shown above. On the left is the
weinre client application, displaying debug
information.
On the right is the target web page, running in Mobile Safari in the iOS Simulator.

In normal usage, you will be running the client application in a browser
on your desktop/laptop, and running a target web page on your mobile device.

In the session above, the debugger is display the Elements panel, with the
embedded console expanded in the bottom third of the window. In the console
area, we've entered two statements:

document.body.style.backgroundColor
document.body.style.backgroundColor = "pink"

The result of running the first statement shows the value of the body's background style is not set.
The second statement sets the body's background to pink. That horrifying pink
background is then rendered in the target's window.

In addition, an h1 element is selected in the upper third of the
Elements panel, which causes the side panels on the right to be filled in with
relevant information. In this case, the matched CSS rules for that h1
element are being shown.

If you are familiar with WebKit's Web Inspector,
a partial list of differences between it and weinre
are listed below:

• weinre does not make use of any 'native' code,
  it's all JavaScript (and currently Java code for the 'server').
• Because weinre doesn't use 'native' code,
  it's functionality is limited. For instance, source level debug of JavaScript
  is not possible
  easy.
• Because weinre doesn't use 'native' code,
  the debug target code will run on browsers
  without specialized debug support. For instance, a browser running on your phone.
• weinre supports 'remote' interaction,
  so you can run the debugger user interface on one
  machine and can debug a web page running
  on another machine. For instance, debug a web page displayed on your phone from your
  laptop.
• Because weinre supports 'remote' interaction,
  multiple debug clients can be debugging the same debug target at the same time.
• One thing not different from Web Inspector is that the debug client
  user interface only runs on WebKit-based browsers.

Supported Libraries and Platforms

Generally version numbers listed here are the earliest
versions of the relevant thing that have been tested.
Later versions of those things are also hopefully supported,
but let us know.

Libraries not supported

• versions of Prototype.js before version 1.7 are not supported,
  as they do not support the JSON.stringify() API correctly. You
  will get an alert() in the web page you are debugging if you
  attempt to debug it with weinre and you are using an unsupported
  version of Prototype.js.

Platforms supported - debug server

Any platform that supports node.js.

Platforms supported - debug client

The browser where the debugger user interface runs.

• Google Chrome
• Apple Safari
• Other recent-ish WebKit-based browsers

Platforms supported - debug target

The browser with the page you are debugging.

• Android Browser application
• iOS Mobile Safari application
• PhoneGap/Cordova
• other

Platforms not supported - debug target

• iOS 3.1.3 or earlier
• webOS 1.45 or earlier