Contributing and Debugging

Contributing and Debugging

Contributing guidelines

PR, code styling and code FAQs are here

For issues, please see the guidelines

Build in debug mode

Required packages

See manual build for deps.

Recommended, CMake

Install the VSCode C/C++ and CMake Tools extensions and use that.

I’ve attached a example/launch.json that you can copy to your .vscode/ folder in the repo root.

With that, you can build in debug, go to the debugging tab and hit (gdb) Launch.

note: You probably want to set watchdog_timeout = 0 in the debug {} section of your config. Otherwise Hyprland will notice its hanging when you hit a breakpoint and it will crash after you continue out of it.

Custom, CLI

make debug

Attach and profile in your preferred way.

Meson 

meson setup build -Dbuildtype=debug
ninja -C build

Nix

To build the package in debug mode, you have to override it like this:

hyprland.override {
  debug = true;
};

This code can go in the package attribute of the NixOS/Home Manager modules.

Running

When running Hyprland in Debug mode, the config is ~/.config/hypr/hyprlandd.conf and the logs can be found at $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/[INSTANCE SIGNATURE]/hyprlandd.log.

LSP and Formatting

If you want proper LSP support in an editor that doesn’t automatically set it up, use clangd. You’ll probably notice there will be a bunch of warnings because we haven’t generated compile commands, to do this run:

cmake -S . -B build/ -G Ninja -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON

Also, before submitting a PR please format with clang-format, to run this only on your changes run git-clang-format in your projects root directory.

Logs, dumps, etc

You can use the logs and the GDB debugger, but running Hyprland in debug compile as a driver and using it for a while might give more insight to the more random bugs.

When Hyprland crashes, use coredumpctl and then coredumpctl info PID to see the dump. See the instructions below for more info about coredumpctl.

You can also use the amazing command

watch -n 0.1 "grep -v \"arranged\" $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE/hyprland.log | tail -n 40"

for live logs. (replace hyprland with hyprlandd for debug builds)

How do I get a coredump?

See ISSUE_GUIDELINES.md.

Nesting Hyprland

Hyprland can run nested in a window. For that, make sure you did the following:

  • built in debug
  • removed ALL exec= and exec-once= keywords from your debug config (hyprlandd.conf)
  • set a resolution for WL-1 and are not using preferred
  • made sure no keybinds overlap (use a different mod for your keybinds altogether)

Once you launch, the display might be cropped. This can be fixed by setting the resolution for WL-1 to the exact dimensions of the window as reported by hyprctl clients.