I use HopToad by the Thoughtbot Guys (I say guys because I know they don’t have any girls on the team *wink*) to handle exceptions from my rails apps these days but today I found myself in a situation where I needed to use the exception_notification plugin instead. I haven’t used the plugin for quite sometime so I wanted to make sure I had everything all setup correctly before pushing out to staging and production. I remembered that I had done this before in development but I couldn’t remember everything I needed to do so I, of course, asked uncle Google. After reading the readme and a little googling I figured out what I needed to do in order to see it work in development. It took me far longer than I wanted and I don’t want to go through that again in the future so I figured I would just write a quick blog post to remind me next time I want to do it.

So here goes:

First get Exception notification all setup (this is all from the readme file)

script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/exception_notification.git

then in application.rb put
include ExceptionNotifiable

then in environment.rb put
ExceptionNotifier.exception_recipients = %w(joe@schmoe.com bill@schmoe.com)

Once you have it setup you can do all the other stuff that lets you see it work in your development environment.

put the following two lines in your application.rb file
alias :rescue_action_locally :rescue_action_in_public
local_addresses.clear

then in your development.rb file change
config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = true
to be
config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = false

Exception Notifier doesn’t send email notification on ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound and ActionController::UnknownAction errors. So you will need to create 500 error to see the notification going out in your log. You can just add an action to a controller that throws a divide by zero error, restart your server and hit that action and you should see the notification trigger in your development log.

Once you have seen it work make sure to undo everything in the second section.

Cheers

This blog entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 6:53 am and is filed under Rails, Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.