RuhRoh is a rails plugin that allows you pre-generate error pages with the full rails stack available.

While rails’ default error pages are great, they look totally unprofessional for any real site. RuRoh provides a quick and easy way to have nicely rendered error pages generated from your stack during deployment. This allows you to re-use your existing layouts and customize your error pages without having to re-create them on the fly (which could result in further errors). The pages can be generated via capistrano during deploy, or generated during a post-commit hook similar to asset pipeline resources.

In your Gemfile, add RuhRoh.

gem 'ruh_roh'

In your routes file, mount the engine on the /error path.

YourApp::Application.routes.draw do
  mount RuhRoh::Engine => "/error"
end

Now you can render out some error pages!

rake ruh_roh:generate

There are default 404, 422 & 500 templates available by default - it will also use your application layout.

To override the existing templates, just make a new view to override the default.

in app/views/ruh_roh/errors/404.html.erb

<h1>Oh noes! Dis page not foundses.</h1>

# Configuration

There are a few config options. Make sure these are set in your config, but in an after_initialize block.

module YourApp
  class Application < Rails::Application

      config.after_initialize do
        # Set error layout
        config.ruh_roh.application_layout = "error"
        # Set error hostname
        config.ruh_roh.application_host = "scoobysnacks.com"
        # Set handled errors
        config.ruh_roh.handled_errors = %(404 418 500)
      end
  end
end

For deployment, you can add this to your capistrano config:

namespace :deploy do
 desc "Generate error pages for production"
 task :generate_error_pages do
   run <<-EOF
     cd #{release_path} && RAILS_ENV='production' bundle exec rake ruh_roh:generate
   EOF
 end
    end
after "deploy:update", "deploy:generate_error_pages"

This should be very similar to your precompile_assets task. If you can’t write to public on your production server, you can consider make the rake task a git post-commit hook or just checking in the html files by hand.

You’ll want to sent an application host if you have and urls in your pages. This is a side effect on how pages are rendered via the integration runner - otherwise you’ll end up with “example.com” for all of your urls.

Also, if your layout or views use any routes for your application, you’ll have to prepend them with “main_app”. For example, “root_url” becomes “main_app.root_url”. This is a bit of a side effect of how rails engine’s work.

This project is released under the MIT License. Have fun, and be excellent to each other.