What do you do with error messages from your production servers? I used to have them all sent to my inbox. I would then have to filter them based on if they were coming from delayed jobs or what part of the site they were relevant to. I would then have to sift through this massive email to find the stack-trace of the environment variables, it was just a pain in the ass. I recently started using Hoptoad to track my error messages. Life has been much easier since that decision. Hoptoad is an online application that acts as an API for receiving your error messages, as well as website for tracking, grouping and resolving those error messages.

The Hoptoad interface is quite simple: related errors are grouped together and you can ‘resolve’ them with a simple switch to indicate that you have taken care of the issue. This is awesome because you don’t have to resolve 10 error messages when there’s really only one thing that’s going wrong. Hoptoad also tracks deployments and errors/minute for some additional fun stats. For organization it splits your error summary, stack trace, environment variables, request parameters, session variables and similar errors into separate tabs for easy navigation. Hoptoad is a paid service but they offer a free plan for a single project, single user and five error messages per minute so that you can try the service out, and their ‘tadpole’, or smallest paid, plan comes in at $5 per month.

My favorite gem to get started using Hoptoad is hoptoad_notifier. You can get detailed installation instructions here. My setup goes something like this:

  1. Add the gem to my Gemfile. 
    gem 'hoptoad_notifier'
  2. Install my bundle. 
    bundle install
  3. Generate my api key yaml file. 
    rails generate hoptoad --api-key
  4. Add a deploy notification to my after_restart script. 
    run "cd #{release_path} && rake hoptoad:deploy
TO=#{@configuration[:environment]}
REVISION=#{@configuration[:revision]}
REPO=#{@configuration[:repository]}"
  5. Add a notification handler to my delayed jobs. 
    # in config/initializers/delayed_job_with_hoptoad.rb
class Delayed::Worker
  alias :handle_failed_job_without_hoptoad :handle_failed_job

  def handle_failed_job(job, error)
    HoptoadNotifier.notify(error)
    handle_failed_job_without_hoptoad(job, error)
  end
end

You’re set to go. All errors in your app and in your delayed job processes will get posted to Hoptoad, and Hoptoad will track your deployments.