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Working directory

The rule: without an explicit cwd, the working directory is the project root.

Not the program's directory. .env, migrations/, configs/ and templates/ live at the repository root, and that is where you run the program by hand.

A package directory is a convention of tests — go test and cargo test start there — not of running. In a layout with several cmd/* binaries it would give as many different working directories as there are binaries, and none of them right.

Resolution order

  1. the profile's explicit cwd;
  2. the project root;
  3. the directory you launched bugsaur from — only for a manual --adapter / --program launch, which has no project and therefore no root.

Setting it explicitly

[profiles.orders-test]
adapter = "dlv"
program = "internal/orders"
cwd = "internal/orders"

A relative cwd resolves from the project root.

The most common reason to set it is a test that reads testdata/ from its own package directory — which is exactly where go test and cargo test would have started it.

It is sent to the adapter, not just set on the process

The working directory goes to the adapter in the DAP request body, rather than only being the adapter process's own directory.

The difference shows up wherever the adapter and the debuggee are separate processes: dlv passes its own directory down to the debuggee by inheritance, while debugpy does not.

For a manual launch

bugsaur run --adapter dlv --program ./cmd/api --cwd .

PHP does not have one

cwd does not apply to PHP: the adapter starts no process, so there is nothing to give a working directory to. The PHP process gets its directory from whoever starts it — PHP-FPM, Docker, the CLI. See Languages → PHP.

Seeing the difference

The behaviour is easy to check on the Rust fixture in the repository, which prints its cwd and whether Cargo.toml is next to it:

make fixture-rust

# The old default — the program's directory, i.e. target/debug:
cd fixtures/rust-hello/target/debug && ./rust-hello   # Cargo.toml alongside: false

# The current default — the package root:
cd fixtures/rust-hello && ./target/debug/rust-hello   # Cargo.toml alongside: true

Under the debugger with no explicit cwd you get the second. To get the first, add cwd = "target/debug" to the profile.