See  everything happening in your running Django app

Regular debuggers can be powerful tools. When you're digging into a specific exception or you know exactly where to look, they can be  very effective at quickly showing you what you need to know. But they also have their downsides. For starters, they can be tricky to set up and use compared to the simplicity of a print(my_variable)
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Once set up and configured, debuggers ask quite a lot of you! They ask you where you'd like to set breakpoints, but you might not even know where you'd like to set them!
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Debuggers can be unhelpful in certain cases, and downright frustrating in  others:

• Debuggers don't help when it's not clear where a breakpoint should be set
• When a specific breakpoint is not getting hit, debuggers don't tell you why it wasn't hit (and what happened instead)
• If you want to know what happened before a breakpoint, you're out of luck. If you want to know what happened after a breakpoint you have to slowly and carefully step through your code using the debugger's interface
• Debuggers can help you gather context for a specific point during the code execution, but they aren't great at giving you an overview of everything that happened. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for and where to find it, debuggers can be surprisingly unhelpful
• If you make a mistake with using the often confusing debugger interface of weirdly shaped arrows, then you need to start all over and hopefully do the right thing this time around

Kolo addresses all of the above. You never need to set any breakpoints. All you need to do is have your Django app serve a request, and then you can start exploring. Go up and down the stack as you please and inspect arguments, return values and local variables for all the code that was executed. All right next to your code inside of VSCode.

Kolo is only intended to be used for local development at this stage. Not in staging or production

Kolo is completely free during Alpha and Beta.

Kolo is being built by the same team building Simple Poll for Slack. Hi!

Django Debug Toolbar is an awesome project. If you haven't yet come across it, you should check it out.

Kolo and Django Debug Toolbar serve some similar needs and have some similar features. For example, both Kolo and Django Debug Toolbar show you all the SQL queries that were made during a request. The biggest difference is that Django Debug Toolbar lives in the browser, whereas Kolo lives in VSCode.

Kolo being inside of VSCode has the benefit that everything is right next to your code, which keeps context switching to a minimum. We can show you the information you need right alongside your code.

Kolo also has functionality that Django Debug Toolbar doesn't have, such as showing you all the code that executed during the request (including function arguments, return values, and local variables), code execution visualisations, information about outbound HTTP requests, and much more.

During installation, Kolo confirms your email address. This is the only time any information is transmitted from the Kolo VSCode extension to our servers (only your email address is transmitted). Everything else such as your code, or any runtime data stays on your machine and is not transmitted anywhere.
The data Kolo collects at runtime is stored in a local SQLite database on your machine. This same SQLite database is then accessed by the VSCode extension to power all of Kolo's functionality.

Head over to our GitHub repository: https://github.com/kolofordjango/kolo

Kolo only works with VSCode for the time being