---
title: Little Green Friend
teaser: Catching rails application errors with a new product.
tags: news,web,airbrake
author: Matt Jankowski
published_on: 2008-07-18
---

Here's a brief introduction to a new application we've been working on.  The
application is called [hoptoad](http://hoptoadapp.com), and it's a hosted web
service which can be used as an error reporting and analysis tool by Rails
applications.  The service is running in the [Engine
Yard](https://www.engineyard.com) cloud and will be completely free when it
launches, so go ahead and sign up to that mailing list and we'll let you know
when it's live.

For the academically curious, the word hoptoad is railroad industry slang for a
derailed train.  At least, it used to be when the railroad industry had slang.

## Background

We've been using Jamis Buck's Exception Notifier Rails plugin for years now, and
for the most part it's accomplished what we wanted.  For the uninitiated, the
Exception Notifier plugin catches all errors that haven't already been caught,
and sends an email with a formatted error report about what happened, where it
happened, the session data, the params, the environment info, etc.

![''](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2008-7-16-logo.gif)

We've used this with great success, probably on ~30 projects or so, and it's
been a reliable way to know when there is an issue with one of the production
applications you are maintaining.

## Problems

The problems we ultimately ran into here...

- We would occasionally get completely hammered with a stream of app error
  emails.  In most cases, this was something completely innocent (like a bunch
  of RoutingError's caused by a new release version changing the url structure,
  or by the rails2 upgrade sending InvalidAuthenticityToken, or by a search
  engine doing something weird like sending us an <abbr title="HyperText
  Transfer Protocol">HTTP</abbr> 'OPTIONS' verb in a request, etc).  In other
  cases, we had legitimately screwed up and had an app which was throwing off
  errors left and right - but in that case, once the first 10 emails trickled
  in, we already knew there was an urgent problem to solve, and the next 1000
  emails didn't make it any more urgent, they just clogged up our inboxes.
- There's no way to measure success over time.  Am I correcting the errors I had
  last deploy?  Am I getting more or less errors each month?
- The errors are a big stream.  If I get error A 10 times, error B 40 times and
  error C 50 times - sure, I have 100 errors - but I really want to know that I
  have three errors, and how many times eacbh of them have occurred.

## Solution

As you may have guessed, we've solved these problems, and replaced the Exception
Notifier in most of the apps we manage, with a homegrown solution called
[hoptoad](http://hoptoadapp.com). Hoptoad is two things:

- A smallish Rails plugin, which installs into `vendor/plugins`, and defines a
  `#rescue_action_in_public` method which does nothing but report the error it
  received (via HTTP POST to a web service), and then return control to the
  framework so that Rails can render the 500 (or 422, or 404, or whatever) page
  that's appropriate for the error.
- The web service, which accepts incoming error reports from various
  applications running the hoptoad plugin, and stores them for later review.

## Plugin

By default, the hoptoad notifier plugin requires only one configuration option:
the <abbr title="Application Programming Interface">API</abbr> key for the
project the plugin is installed into, so that it can be properly stored.  In
addition to that, it is possible to specify a set of errors that you'd like the
plugin to ignore (it has a default set to ignore and not report on, which you
may override).  The plugin, and sample configuration, are available from the
project configuration area within the application.

## Web application

The application is responsible for grouping errors, marking inactive errors,
providing rss feeds of groups of errors, managing user access to error reports,
handling incoming errors from the plugin via an <abbr title="Application
Programming Interface">API</abbr>, etc.

We expect to the public launch to be sometime next week, so stay tuned.

> If my train goes off the track,
> pick it up, pick it up, pick it up back back
> back to the grill again, the grill again
> friends
> how many MC's must get dissed?

-KRS One

FYI: _Hoptoad/Airbrake was sold to RackSpace and is now called [Airbrake Bug Tracker](http://airbrake.io)_.