At Toura, we perform the vast majority of our day-to-day development in our desktop WebKit browsers - Chrome and Safari. Although the desktop browsers are a very close approximation to the mobile browsers, there’s no substitute for actually performing final QA and fit & finish checks on the mobile browsers themselves followed by a final sanity check with a compiled application.

What happens, though, if you find a display bug on device browser that you don’t see on the desktop? What about a JavaScript error in the WebView? How would you go about debugging that? Enter: Weinre.

Weinre, written by Patrick Mueller, provides a client/server environment to present you with a familiar “web inspector”-like experience on apps running on mobile device browsers and webviews.

Installing and configuring Weinre is simple enough and you can accomplish this by following the instructions at the Weinre website. OR, instead of going through all of that and keeping Weinre running (it requires a local process) and poking holes in your firewall, you can use our free hosted Weinre service!

To use the hosted Weinre service:

1. Boot any app in development mode via:

   a. mulberry serve and point your device browser to your local Mulberry server OR

   b. mulberry test and run the app in your device simulator/emulator

2. In the lower right hand corner, tap the “Weinre” button

3. Go to Toura Weinre and enter the code displayed at the top of the page
4. Click the provided link and debug away; that’s it!

Now you can develop on your local browser and perform final checks on your iOS and Android devices. If you encounter a bug, you can quickly and easily hook a remote web inspector to your page. Access the Javascript console, edit HTML, and more - right on the device!