Staying on top of errors that happen in your production Rails applications is a must. Unfortunately trawling through log files get old really fast, and getting enough information about where the error happened can be hard.
That’s what services like Exceptional or Hoptoad solves. Whenever an error occurs in your application the details are sent to their service, where you are able to see when, where and how many times a given error has occurred.
However, if you’re uneasy about sending this level of details to a third party service - or if you’re simply a cheapskate like me, there is another way using Redmine.
Fortunately that’s very easy. You need two pieces of open source software:
Simply install the Redmine Hoptoad Server plugin (this fork in particular) into your Redmine installation as described on the wiki page.
Then install the official Hoptoad Notifier plugin into your application and configure it as describe in the README from Redmine Hoptoad Server.
Voila, from your next deployment onwards your Redmine will be receiving bug reports directly from your application, including stack traces, session values, environment variables and all the good stuff you need to investigate the issue.
Thanks for this article, it helped me find what I was looking for.
I tryied and I had 2 thoughts :
* What a verbose comment ! Is there a (clean) way to make it prettier ?
* What if my application sends 1000 errors. Will redmine handle it ?
And after I really tried, another difficulty.
I configured the notifier to assign the tickets to a technical account, so that I am warned by email. But as It creates the ticket THEN add a comment, I receive 3 emails instead of one (I dont explain the 3rd one).
Anyone has tips about this issue, i'm interested !
It's true, there are lot of rough edges using this method, and a dedicated exception-tracking service is bound to provide more polish.
The reports/comments are very verbose, but that's a good thing in my eyes. You never know exactly what piece of information is going to help you debug. Formatting could definitely do with some work.
Also the exception-to-Redmine-issue matching algorithm could be more sophisticated.
I am sure the Redmine Hoptoad Server project is looking forward to our patches.