HoptoadNotifier

This is the notifier plugin for integrating apps with Hoptoad.

When an uncaught exception occurs, HoptoadNotifier will POST the relevant data to the Hoptoad server specified in your environment.

INSTALLATION

---

REMOVE EXCEPTION_NOTIFIER

In your ApplicationController, REMOVE this line:

include ExceptionNotifiable

In your config/environment* files, remove all references to ExceptionNotifier

Remove the vendor/plugins/exception_notifier directory.

INSTALL HOPTOAD_NOTIFIER

From your project’s RAILS_ROOT, run:

script/plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/hoptoad_notifier.git

CONFIGURATION

You should have something like this in config/initializers/hoptoad.rb.

HoptoadNotifier.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = '1234567890abcdef'
end

(Please note that this configuration should be in a global configuration, and is not enrivonment-specific. Hoptoad is smart enough to know what errors are caused by what environments, so your staging errors don’t get mixed in with your production errors.)

Then, to enable hoptoad in your application, include this code…

include HoptoadNotifier::Catcher

…in your ApplicationController, and all exceptions will be logged to Hoptoad where they can be aggregated, filtered, sorted, analyzed, massaged, and searched.

** NOTE FOR RAILS 1.2.* USERS: ** You will need to copy the hoptoad_notifier_tasks.rake file into your RAILS_ROOT/lib/tasks directory in order for the following to work:

You can test that hoptoad is working in your production environment by using this rake task (from RAILS_ROOT):

rake hoptoad:test

If everything is configured properly, that task will send a notice to hoptoad which will be visible immediately.

USAGE

For the most part, hoptoad works for itself. Once you’ve included the notifier in your ApplicationController, all errors will be rescued by the #rescue_action_in_public provided by the plugin.

If you want to log arbitrary things which you’ve rescued yourself from a controller, you can do something like this:

...
rescue => ex
  notify_hoptoad(ex)
  flash[:failure] = 'Encryptions could not be rerouted, try again.'
end
...

The #notify_hoptoad call will send the notice over to hoptoad for later analysis.

GOING BEYOND EXCEPTIONS

You can also pass a hash to notify_hoptoad method and store whatever you want, not just an exception. And you can also use it anywhere, not just in controllers:

begin 
  params = { 
    # params that you pass to a method that can throw an exception 
  }
  my_unpredicable_method(params) 
rescue => e
  HoptoadNotifier.notify(
    :error_class => "Special Error", 
    :error_message => "Special Error: #{e.message}", 
    :request => { :params => params }
  )
end

While in your controllers you use the notify_hoptoad method, anywhere else in your code, use HoptoadNotifier.notify. Hoptoad will get all the information about the error itself. As for a hash, these are the keys you should pass:

* :error_class – Use this to group similar errors together. When Hoptoad catches an exception it sends the class name of that exception object.
* :error_message – This is the title of the error you see in the errors list. For exceptions it is "#{exception.class.name}: #{exception.message}"
* :request – While there are several ways to send additional data to Hoptoad, passing a Hash with :params key as :request as in the example above is the most common use case. When Hoptoad catches an exception in a controller, the actual HTTP client request is being sent using this key.

Hoptoad merges the hash you pass with these default options:

def default_notice_options
  { 
    :api_key => HoptoadNotifier.api_key, 
    :error_message => 'Notification', 
    :backtrace => caller, 
    :request => {}, 
    :session => {}, 
    :environment => ENV.to_hash 
  } 
end

You can override any of those parameters.

FILTERING

You can specify a whitelist of errors, that Hoptoad will not report on. Use this feature when you are so apathetic to certain errors that you don’t want them even logged.

This filter will only be applied to automatic notifications, not manual notifications (when #notify is called directly).

Hoptoad ignores the following exceptions by default:

ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
ActionController::RoutingError
ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken
CGI::Session::CookieStore::TamperedWithCookie

To ignore errors in addition to those, specify their names in your Hoptoad configuration block.

HoptoadNotifier.configure do |config|
  config.api_key      = '1234567890abcdef'
  config.ignore       << ActiveRecord::IgnoreThisError
end

To ignore only certain errors (and override the defaults), use the #ignore_only attribute.

HoptoadNotifier.configure do |config|
  config.api_key      = '1234567890abcdef'
  config.ignore_only  = [ActiveRecord::IgnoreThisError]
end

TESTING

When you run your tests, you might notice that the hoptoad service is recording notices generated using #notify when you don’t expect it to. You can use code like this in your test_helper.rb to redefine that method so those errors are not reported while running tests.

module HoptoadNotifier::Catcher
  def notify(thing)
    # do nothing.
  end
end

THANKS

Thanks to Eugene Bolshakov for the excellent write-up on GOING BEYOND EXCEPTIONS, which we have included above.