HydraulicBrake

This is a replacement notifier gem for the Airbrake gem which is used for integrating ruby apps with Airbrake.

Transitioning from Airbrake to HydraulicBrake

HydraulicBrake is a lighter weight alternative to the Airbrake gem and takes a different design approach. HydraulicBrake doesn't attempt to integrate with any frameworks and has few dependencies. HydraulicBrake doesn't change anything outside its own namespace. It doesn't do any automatic exception handling or configuration. HydraulicBrake doesn't ignore any exceptions. If you don't want to send a notification, then don't call HydraulicBrake#notify.

If you were previously using the Airbrake gem, and you want to use HydraulicBrake instead, you'll need to install error handlers wherever you intend to catch errors. The right place to do that depends entirely on your application, but a good place to start would be rescue_action_in_public for rails apps and Rack middleware for Rack apps.

Configuration

Configure HydraulicBrake when your app starts with a configuration block like this one:

HydraulicBrake.configure do |config|
  config.host = "api.airbrake.io"
  config.port = "443"
  config.secure = true
  config.environment_name = "staging"
  config.api_key = "<api-key-from-your-airbrake-server>"
end

Usage

Wherever you want to notify an Airbrake server, just call HydraulicBrake#notify

begin
  my_unpredicable_method
rescue => e
  HydraulicBrake.notify(
    :error_class   => "Special Error",
    :error_message => "Special Error: #{e.message}",
    :parameters    => params
  )
end

HydraulicBrake merges the hash you pass with these default options:

{
  :api_key       => HydraulicBrake.api_key,
  :error_message => 'Notification',
  :backtrace     => caller,
  :parameters    => {},
  :session       => {}
}

You can override any of those parameters and there are many other parameters you can add. See the inline documentation for HydraulicBrake#notify.

Async Notifications

HydraulicBrake can send notifications for you in the background using a Ruby thread. If configured for async notifications, calls to HydraulicBrake::Notify will populate an in-memory queue up to a configurable limit. If you reach the limit, HydraulicBrake will send an error to HydraulicBrake.logger for every additional notice beyond the queue's capacity and this notice will contain information about the notice that could not be sent. Shown below are the default options, but you may adjust them to suit your needs.

HydraulicBrake.configure do |config|
  config.async = false
  config.async_queue_capacity = 100
end

Proxy Support

The notifier supports using a proxy. To configure a proxy, add the configuration to HydraulicBrake#configure:

HydraulicBrake.configure do |config|
  config.proxy_host = proxy.host.com
  config.proxy_port = 4038
  config.proxy_user = foo # optional
  config.proxy_pass = bar # optional
end

Logging

HydraulicBrake uses STDOUT by default. If you want to use a different logger, just pass another Logger instance inside your configuration:

HydraulicBrake.configure do |config|
  config.logger = Logger.new("path/to/your/log/file")
end

Credits

Thank you to all the airbrake contributors for making HydraulicBrake possible.