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.
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 copy the required migration over to your app.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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 } }
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
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.
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"] = "[email protected]" # defaults to "[email protected]"
ENV["SOLIDERRORS_EMAIL_TO"] = "[email protected]" # no default, must be set
Second, you can set the values via the configuration object:
# Set authentication credentials for Solid Errors
config.solid_errors.send_emails = true
config.solid_errors.email_from = "[email protected]"
config.solid_errors.email_to = "[email protected]"
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.
There are only two screens in the dashboard.
- the index view of all unresolved errors:
- and the show view of a particular error:
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
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>
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.
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.
The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.
Everyone interacting in the SolidErrors project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.