Yes, there is a way to debug tridion templates locally.

**@Rob** has provided wonderful facility to debug templates locally without connecting to remote `TcmTemplateDebugHost.exe`

What is TcmDebugger?
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**TcmDebugger** is a .NET console application which runs the SDL Tridion Content Manager render/publishing engine in a local context. 

This allows a developer to extensively debug .NET templates, .NET custom functionsources and .NET custom mediators on their local workstation. 

**[SDL Tridion Content Manager .NET Templating Debugger][1]**

With this TCMDebugger, we can test the template in both engine types that is **Debug** and **Render** engines

[1]:https://code.google.com/p/tcmdebugger/