Solid Errors

Solid Errors is a DB-based, app-internal exception tracker for Rails applications, designed with simplicity and performance in mind. It uses the new Rails error reporting API to store uncaught exceptions in the database, and provides a simple UI for viewing and managing exceptions.

Warning

The current point release of Rails (7.1.3.2) has a bug which severely limits the utility of Solid Errors. Exceptions raised during a web request are not reported to Rails' error reporter. There is a fix in the main branch, but it has not been released in a new point release. As such, Solid Errors is not production-ready unless you are running Rails from the main branch or until a new point version is released and you upgrade. The original bug report can be found here and the pull request making the fix is here. I will try to backport the fix into the gem directly, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.

Installation

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

$ bundle add solid_errors

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

$ gem install solid_errors

After installing the gem, run the installer:

$ rails generate solid_errors:install

This will create the db/errors_schema.rb file.

You will then have to add the configuration for the errors database in config/database.yml. If you're using sqlite, it'll look something like this:

production:
  primary:
    <<: *default
    database: storage/production.sqlite3
  errors:
    <<: *default
    database: storage/production_errors.sqlite3
    migrations_paths: db/errors_migrate

...or if you're using MySQL/PostgreSQL/Trilogy:

production:
  primary: &primary_production
    <<: *default
    database: app_production
    username: app
    password: <%= ENV["APP_DATABASE_PASSWORD"] %>
  errors:
    <<: *primary_production
    database: app_production_errors
    migrations_paths: db/errors_migrate

Note

Calling bin/rails solid_errors:install will automatically add config.solid_errors.connects_to = { database: { writing: :errors } } to config/environments/production.rb, so no additional configuration is needed there (although you must make sure that you use the errors name in database.yml for this to match!). But if you want to use Solid Errors in a different environment (like staging or even development), you'll have to manually add that config.solid_errors.connects_to line to the respective environment file. And, as always, make sure that the name you're using for the database in config/database.yml matches the name you use in config.solid_errors.connects_to.

Then run db:prepare in production to ensure the database is created and the schema is loaded.

Then mount the engine in your config/routes.rb file:

authenticate :user, -> (user) { user.admin? } do
  mount SolidErrors::Engine, at: "/solid_errors"
end

Note

Be sure to secure the dashboard in production.

Usage

All exceptions are recorded automatically. No additional code required.

Please consult the official guides for an introduction to the error reporting API.

There are intentionally few features; you can view and resolve errors. That’s it. The goal is to provide a simple, lightweight, and performant solution for tracking exceptions in your Rails application. If you need more features, you should probably use a 3rd party service like Honeybadger, whose MIT-licensed Ruby agent gem provided a couple of critical pieces of code for this project.

Manually reporting an Error

Errors can be added to Solid Errors via the Rails error reporter.

There are three ways you can use the error reporter:

Rails.error.handle will report any error raised within the block. It will then swallow the error, and the rest of your code outside the block will continue as normal.

result = Rails.error.handle do
  1 + '1' # raises TypeError
end
result # => nil
1 + 1 # This will be executed

Rails.error.record will report errors to all registered subscribers and then re-raise the error, meaning that the rest of your code won't execute.

Rails.error.record do
  1 + '1' # raises TypeError
end
1 + 1 # This won't be executed

You can also manually report errors by calling Rails.error.report:

begin
  # code
rescue StandardError => e
  Rails.error.report(e)
end

All 3 reporting APIs (#handle, #record, and #report) support the following options, which are then passed along to all registered subscribers:

• handled: a Boolean to indicate if the error was handled. This is set to true by default. #record sets this to false.
• severity: a Symbol describing the severity of the error. Expected values are: :error, :warning, and :info. #handle sets this to :warning, while #record sets it to :error.
• context: a Hash to provide more context about the error, like request or user details
• source: a String about the source of the error. The default source is "application". Errors reported by internal libraries may set other sources; the Redis cache library may use "redis_cache_store.active_support", for instance. Your subscriber can use the source to ignore errors you aren't interested in.

Rails.error.handle(context: { user_id: user.id }, severity: :info) do
  # ...
end

Configuration

You can configure Solid Errors via the Rails configuration object, under the solid_errors key. Currently, 6 configuration options are available:

• connects_to - The database configuration to use for the Solid Errors database. See Database Configuration for more information.
• username - The username to use for HTTP authentication. See Authentication for more information.
• password - The password to use for HTTP authentication. See Authentication for more information.
• sends_email - Whether or not to send emails when an error occurs. See Email notifications for more information.
• email_from - The email address to send a notification from. See Email notifications for more information.
• email_to - The email address(es) to send a notification to. See Email notifications for more information.
• email_subject_prefix - Prefix added to the subject line for email notifications. See Email notifications for more information.

Database Configuration

config.solid_errors.connects_to takes a custom database configuration hash that will be used in the abstract SolidErrors::Record Active Record model. This is required to use a different database than the main app (but the primary database can also be used). For example:

# Use a single separate DB for Solid Errors
config.solid_errors.connects_to = { database: { writing: :solid_errors, reading: :solid_errors } }

or

# Use a separate primary/replica pair for Solid Errors
config.solid_errors.connects_to = { database: { writing: :solid_errors_primary, reading: :solid_errors_replica } }

Single Database Configuration

Running Solid Errors in a separate database is recommended, but it's also possible to use one single database for both the app and the errors. Just follow these steps to add errors to the primary database:

1. Copy the contents of db/errors_schema.rb into a normal migration and delete db/errors_schema.rb
2. Remove config.solid_errors.connects_to from your configuration files.
3. Migrate your database.

You won't have multiple databases, so database.yml doesn't need to have the errors database configuration.

Authentication

Solid Errors does not restrict access out of the box. You must secure the dashboard yourself. However, it does provide basic HTTP authentication that can be used with basic authentication or Devise. All you need to do is setup a username and password.

There are two ways to setup a username and password. First, you can use the SOLIDERRORS_USERNAME and SOLIDERRORS_PASSWORD environment variables:

ENV["SOLIDERRORS_USERNAME"] = "frodo"
ENV["SOLIDERRORS_PASSWORD"] = "ikeptmysecrets"

Second, you can set the SolidErrors.username and SolidErrors.password variables in an initializer:

# Set authentication credentials for Solid Errors
config.solid_errors.username = Rails.application.credentials.solid_errors.username
config.solid_errors.password = Rails.application.credentials.solid_errors.password

Either way, if you have set a username and password, Solid Errors will use basic HTTP authentication. If you have not set a username and password, Solid Errors will not require any authentication to view the dashboard.

If you use Devise for authentication in your app, you can also restrict access to the dashboard by using their authenticate constraint in your routes file:

authenticate :user, -> (user) { user.admin? } do
  mount SolidErrors::Engine, at: "/solid_errors"
end

Email notifications

Solid Errors can send email notifications whenever an error occurs, if your application has ActionMailer already properly setup to send emails. However, in order to activate this feature you must define the email address(es) to send the notifications to. Optionally, you can also define the email address to send the notifications from (useful if your email provider only allows emails to be sent from a predefined list of addresses) or simply turn off this feature altogether. You can also define a subject prefix for the email notifications to quickly identify the source of the error.

There are two ways to configure email notifications. First, you can use environment variables:

ENV["SOLIDERRORS_SEND_EMAILS"] = true # defaults to false
ENV["SOLIDERRORS_EMAIL_FROM"] = "errors@myapp.com" # defaults to "solid_errors@noreply.com"
ENV["SOLIDERRORS_EMAIL_TO"] = "devs@myapp.com" # no default, must be set
ENV["SOLIDERRORS_EMAIL_SUBJECT_PREFIX"] = "[Application name][Environment]" # no default, optional

Second, you can set the values via the configuration object:

# Set authentication credentials and optional subject prefix for Solid Errors
config.solid_errors.send_emails = true
config.solid_errors.email_from = "errors@myapp.com"
config.solid_errors.email_to = "devs@myapp.com"
config.solid_errors.email_subject_prefix = "[#{Rails.application.name}][#{Rails.env}]"

If you have set send_emails to true and have set an email_to address, Solid Errors will send an email notification whenever an error occurs. If you have not set send_emails to true or have not set an email_to address, Solid Errors will not send any email notifications.

Examples

There are only two screens in the dashboard.

• the index view of all unresolved errors:

• and the show view of a particular error:

Usage with API-only Applications

If your Rails application is an API-only application (generated with the rails new --api command), you will need to add the following middleware to your config/application.rb file in order to use the dashboard UI provided by Solid Errors:

# /config/application.rb
config.middleware.use ActionDispatch::Cookies
config.middleware.use ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore
config.middleware.use ActionDispatch::Flash

Overwriting the views

You can find the views in app/views.

app/views/
├── layouts
│   └── solid_errors
│       ├── _style.html
│       └── application.html.erb
└── solid_errors
    ├── error_mailer
    │   ├── error_occurred.html.erb
    │   └── error_occurred.text.erb
    ├── errors
    │   ├── _actions.html.erb
    │   ├── _error.html.erb
    │   ├── _row.html.erb
    │   ├── index.html.erb
    │   └── show.html.erb
    └── occurrences
        ├── _collection.html.erb
        └── _occurrence.html.erb

You can always take control of the views by creating your own views and/or partials at these paths in your application. For example, if you wanted to overwrite the application layout, you could create a file at app/views/layouts/solid_errors/application.html.erb. If you wanted to remove the footer and the automatically disappearing flash messages, as one concrete example, you could define that file as:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Solid Errors</title>
    <%= csrf_meta_tags %>
    <%= csp_meta_tag %>

    <%= render "layouts/solid_errors/style" %>
  </head>
  <body class="pb-4">
    <main class="container mx-auto mt-4">
      <%= content_for?(:content) ? yield(:content) : yield %>
    </main>

    <div class="fixed top-0 left-0 right-0 text-center py-2">
      <% if notice.present? %>
        <p class="py-2 px-3 bg-green-50 text-green-500 font-medium rounded-lg inline-block">
          <%= notice %>
        </p>
      <% end %>

      <% if alert.present? %>
        <p class="py-2 px-3 bg-red-50 text-red-500 font-medium rounded-lg inline-block">
          <%= alert %>
        </p>
      <% end %>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

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Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/fractaledmind/solid_errors. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

License

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

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the SolidErrors project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.