Vue apps are a joy to write, and often fairly easy to debug. But do you know what would make debugging better? A dedicated way to hook into Vue apps and manipulate them from your browser’s devtools. What? Such a thing already exists? Oh. Well then. I suppose we’ll have to write about it now, won’t we.

Vue has a quality Chrome (and Firefox, sort of) extension that allows inspecting component trees, reviewing events, and time-travel debugging of Vuex states. These features make debugging ridiculously simple, even for fairly large apps.

For Chrome: The Vue devtools can be installed from the Chrome Web Store.

For Firefox: A workaround is described for installing the extension in Firefox on the Vue Devtools Wiki.

The devtools provide a DOM-style tree overview of all the components in your app, with information about each component’s data, properties, computed properties, and vuex bindings in the details pane.

Hands down the most useful feature of the devtools is time-travel debugging for apps using Vuex. It allows you to observe, revert, and flatten your Vuex store over time. You could use this to revert to a previous state, replay events to get a second look at bugs, or inspect the various moving parts that go into making a Vuex store work in the details pane.

The Event pane provides access to all events emitted by components in the app along with their names, sources, and payloads.

Enjoy your newfound debugging power! (Unless you already knew about it, in which case… well… Sorry to disappoint.)