Development Blog: Viget Labs

Tony Pitale, Web Developer, July 30, 2008 4

I was notified on Monday (or thereabouts) that Hoptoad had launched. Hoptoad is a service which stands to act as an intermediary between your Rails application exceptions and your email inbox. Any notification of exceptions raised will be delivered to Hoptoad and any repeat exceptions will be combined and counted. An email notification is still sent, but more intelligently (instead of hundreds of emails flooding your inbox).

Having completed registration, I added a number of separate projects. Instructions for setting up a Rails application follows. WIth a simple plugin, and a new initializer, my Rails application was all set to go.  I was able to configure and run the Hoptoad rake test in less than a minute. I did have to update an older project to Rails 2.1 and I’m not sure which versions specifically are compatible. All other projects worked without so much as a hiccup. As would be expected, a handy feed is provided.

After receiving an exception, Hoptoad will list it on the project’s page with a handy count of duplicate exceptions:

Exceptions appear to be compiled by an interesting combination of exception type, controller/action, and the exception message raised. The summary page details the time for the latest of each of the exceptions. Exceptions that have been reviewed on the site are marked as “resolved” and can be hidden. I was able to cull this information using the included rake test task, modified to raise a variety of exceptions, from different actions. I ran the modified task many times over to see how the errors would be combined. Any further insight into this process would be interesting to hear, so please leave comments.

Clicking on the exception will bring up all the wonderful details including details about the environment and the backtrace:

For new exceptions an email notification is sent:

I can’t vouch for the other members of the team here at Viget Labs but, for me, Hoptoad seems like a great fit. I always felt that email, while relatively immediate, was far too difficult to wade through with a large volume (my inbox doesn’t scale). I can understand the reason for reporting every single exception though the process always seemed inelegant. Hoptoad has successfully solved this problem, given my domain. I’ll report again after using Hoptoad in production for longer than a week.