Is it possible to automatically break into the debugger when a exception is thrown?

If ones catches an exception outside of the function it is originally thrown, ones loses access to the local stack. As a result one cannot inspect the values of the variables that might have caused the exception.

Is there a way to automatically start break into the debugger (import pdb; pdb.set_trace()) whenever a exception is thrown to inspect the local stack?

I found what I was looking for in an answer to What is the simplest way of using Python pdb to inspect the cause of an unhandled exception?

Wrap it with that:

def debug_on(*exceptions):
    if not exceptions:
        exceptions = (AssertionError, )
    def decorator(f):
        @functools.wraps(f)
        def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
            try:
                return f(*args, **kwargs)
            except exceptions:
                pdb.post_mortem(sys.exc_info()[2])
        return wrapper
    return decorator

Example:

@debug_on(TypeError)
def buggy_function()
    ....
    raise TypeError