neal street design

Our new application - Share Astronomy - was written with Ruby on Rails. Many Rails developers use the exception_notifier plugin for exception handling. We decided to use the Hoptoad hosted service instead. So far, we are extremely pleased.

One of the primary advantages of Hoptoad is that we only receive an email once when there’s an error rather than receiving duplicate emails every time the same error occurs. Hoptoad also has a very slick user interface that lets you inspect the value of all parameters, view your session data, scroll through the backtrace, etc. And, to top it off, it’s very affordable - ranging from free to $25/month depending on features and functionality.

Installation and setup was easy:

First, if you have exception_notifier, you must remove it.

Next, from your project’s RAILS_ROOT you run the following command:

script/plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/hoptoad_notifier.git

Then, in the config/initializers/hoptoad.rb file you should have something like this:

HoptoadNotifier.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = '12aa34567bbcc8901dddeeef'
end

More detailed instructions (including the steps necessary to remove exception_notifier) can be found on the Hoptoad Github site.

Finally, there are other exception notification services out there. One example would be Exceptional. I don’t have any experience with Exceptional, though, so I can’t provide a comparison.