ActiveError

One of the fundemental tools needed to take your Rails app to production is a way to track errors that are triggered. Unfortunately, there aren't many free, easy, open source ways to track them for small or medium apps. Honeybadger, Sentry, and AppSignal are great, but they are are closed source. With Sentry looking at using your data as training data(link) there should be an easy open source alternative where you control the data. With Rails 8's ethos of No PAAS, there should be a way for new apps to start out with a basic error reporter and not be forced to pay a third party for one.

ActiveError hooks into the error reporting api baked directly into Rails. These third party error loggers also try to make their own fancy backtrace and debugging view. But the one Rails developers are most comfortable with is the one baked into Rails that we use everyday in development. So with ActiveError, when an error gets raised it's captured and stored in the database (we attempt to group the same error together as Instances to reduce noise) and then we recreate the error and display it using the built in debug view from Rails (with a few font and styling tweaks). Once you've resolved the error you can click "Resolve" which will destroy the record.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "activeerror"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install activeerror

Run the installer and migrate:

bin/rails active_error:install
bin/rails db:migrate

This will mount a route in your routes file to view the errors at /errors.

You can supply a list of the string version of an error class to ignored to ignore classes of errors.

config.active_error.ignored = ["NoMethodError"]

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rails test to run the unit tests.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, execute bin/publish (major|minor|patch) which will update the version number in version.rb, create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to GitHub.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.