Debug Jest Tests In create-react-app

When you put a debugger; statement in one of your Jest tests and run yarn test, the test runner will ignore the debug statement and run to completion. This is because Jest defaults to parallelizing tests which won't mix well with manual debugging intervention.

If we want to be able to run our Jest tests through a debugger. We will need two things. First, we need a debugging environment -- Chrome's devtools will work well for this. Second, we need our tests to run in band. The react-scripts documentation recommends adding a second, debug-specific test command to your package.json:

"scripts": {
  "test:debug": "react-scripts --inspect-brk test --runInBand --env=jsdom"
}

You can now run yarn test:debug which will start a paused debug session. Open chrome at chrome://inspect to access and open the debugging session panel. Now, debug away.