Errbit

The open source, self-hosted error catcher

Errbit is a tool for collecting and managing errors from other applications. It is Airbrake (formerly known as Hoptoad) API compliant, so if you are already using Airbrake, you can just point the airbrake gem to your Errbit server.

Apps Errors Error Summary Error Backtraces

Errbit may be a good fit for you if:

• Your exceptions may contain sensitive data that you don't want sitting on someone else's server
• Your application is behind a firewall
• You'd like to brand your error catcher
• You want to add customer features to your error catcher
• You're crazy and love managing servers

If this doesn't sound like you, you should probably stick with a hosted service such as Airbrake.

Mailing List

Join the Google Group at https://groups.google.com/group/errbit to receive updates and notifications.

Demo

There is a demo available at http://errbit-demo.herokuapp.com/

Email: demo@errbit-demo.herokuapp.com Password: password

Requirements

The list of requirements to install Errbit are :

• Ruby 2.1.0 or higher
• MongoDB 2.2.0 or higher

Installation

Note: This app is intended for people with experience deploying and maintaining Rails applications. If you're uncomfortable with any steps below then Errbit is not for you.

Set up your local box or server(Ubuntu):

• Install MongoDB. Follow the directions here, then:

apt-get update
apt-get install mongodb-10gen

• Install libxml, libzip, libssl and libcurl

apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libzip-dev libssl-dev

• Install Bundler

gem install bundler

Running Locally:

• Install dependencies

bundle install

• Install MongoDB. Follow the directions here, then:

• Bootstrap Errbit. This will seed the database. Make sure you copy the username and password down someplace safe.

rake errbit:bootstrap

• Start Server

rails s

Configuration

Errbit configuration is done entirely through environment variables. See configuration

Deploy Hooks

Errbit can track your application deploys. See deploy hooks

Deployment

See notes on deployment

Authentication

Configuring GitHub authentication:

• Set GITHUB_AUTHENTICATION to true
• Register your instance of Errbit at https://github.com/settings/applications

If you hosted Errbit at errbit.example.com, you would fill in:

URL:http://errbit.example.com/ Callback URL:http://errbit.example.com/users/auth/github

• After you have registered your app, set GITHUB_CLIENT_ID and GITHUB_SECRET with your app's Client ID and Secret key.

When you start your applicatoin, you should see the option to Sign in with GitHub on the Login page.

You will also be able to link your GitHub profile to your user account on your Edit profile page.

If you have signed in with GitHub, or linked your GitHub profile, and the App has a GitHub repo configured, then you will be able to create issues on GitHub. You will still be able to create an issue on the App's configured issue tracker.

You can change the requested account permissions by setting GITHUB_ACCESS_SCOPE to:

['repo'] Allow creating issues for public and private repos. ['public_repo'] Only allow creating issues for public repos. [] No permission to create issues on any repos.

• GITHUB_ORG_ID is an optional environment variable you can set to your own github organization id. If set, any user of the specified GitHub organization can login. If it is their first time, an account will automatically be created for them.

Configuring LDAP authentication:

• Set USER_HAS_USERNAME to true
• Follow the instructions at https://github.com/cschiewek/devise_ldap_authenticatable to set up the devise_ldap_authenticatable gem.
• Ensure to set config.ldap_create_user = true in config/initializers/devise.rb, this enables creating the users from LDAP, otherwhise login will not work.

• Create a new initializer (e.g. config/initializers/devise_ldap.rb) and add the following code to enable ldap authentication in the User-model:

  Errbit::Config.devise_modules << :ldap_authenticatable
  

• If you are authenticating by username, you will need to set the user's email manually before authentication. You must add the following lines to app/models/user.rb:

  def ldap_before_save
    name = Devise::LDAP::Adapter.get_ldap_param(self.username, "givenName")
    surname = Devise::LDAP::Adapter.get_ldap_param(self.username, "sn")
    mail = Devise::LDAP::Adapter.get_ldap_param(self.username, "mail")

    self.name = (name + surname).join ' '
    self.email = mail.first
  end

• Now login with your user from LDAP, this will create a user in the database
• Open a rails console and set the admin flag for your user:

user = User.first
user.admin = true
user.save!

Upgrading

When upgrading Errbit, please run:

git pull origin master # assuming origin is the github.com/errbit/errbit repo
bundle install
rake db:migrate
rake assets:precompile

This will ensure that your application stays up to date with any schema changes.

Upgrading errbit from version 0.2 to 0.3

The MongoDB connection file config/mongoid.yml has changed between version 0.2 and 0.3. We have provided a new example configuration file to use at config/mongoid.example.yml.

This change is not needed if you use ENV variables to define access to your MongoDB database.

User information in error reports

Errbit can now display information about the user who experienced an error. This gives you the ability to ask the user for more information, and let them know when you've fixed the bug.

If you are running a Rails application and would like to include information about the current user in your error reports, you can replace the airbrake gem in your Gemfile with airbrake_user_attributes. This gem is a wrapper around the airbrake gem and will automatically inject information about the user into any error reports, so long as your controllers respond to a #current_user method. The user's attributes are filtered to remove authentication fields.

If user information is received with an error report, it will be displayed under the User Details tab:

(This tab will be hidden if no user information is available.)

Javascript error notifications

You can log javascript errors that occur in your application by including airbrake-js javascript library.

First you need to add airbrake-shim.js to your site and set some basic configuration options:

<script src="airbrake-shim.js" data-airbrake-project-id="ERRBIT API KEY" data-airbrake-project-key="ERRBIT API KEY" data-airbrake-environment-name="production" data-airbrake-host="http://errbit.yourdomain.com"></script>

Or you can just add shim file and set these options using:

Airbrake.setProject("ERRBIT API KEY", "ERRBIT API KEY");
Airbrake.setHost("http://errbit.yourdomain.com");

And that's it.

Testing API V3 using ruby airbrake client

If you want you test standard airbrake ruby gem with API V3. To do that you need to change your airbrake initializer file to something like this:

Airbrake.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = ENV['airbrake_api_key']
  config.host    = ENV['airbrake_host']
  config.port    = ENV['airbrake_port'].to_i
  config.secure  = ENV['airbrake_secure'] == 'true'
  config.project_id = ENV['airbrake_api_key']
end

class Airbrake::Sender
  def json_api_enabled?
    true
  end
end

It is important to set project_id option to the same value as api_key, because project_id is required for building url to api endpoint. And airbrake has a bug that removes api_key from endpoint url. The only way to get this value is by passing it as project_id. This little monkey-patch is required because airbrake gem only uses v3 api when host is set to collect.airbrake.io.

V3 request don't have framework option so you won't see this value in your error notices in errbit. Besides that everything looks the same. It was tested using rake airbrake:test for both v2 and v3.

Using custom fingerprinting methods

Errbit allows you to use your own Fingerprinting Strategy. If you are upgrading from a very old version of errbit, you can use the Fingerprint::MD5 for compatibility. The fingerprint strategy can be changed by adding an initializer to errbit:

# config/fingerprint.rb
ErrorReport.fingerprint_strategy = Fingerprint::MD5

The easiest way to add custom fingerprint methods is to simply subclass Fingerprint

Plugins and Integrations

You can extend Errbit by adding Ruby gems and plugins which are generally also gems. It's nice to keep track of which gems are core Errbit dependencies and which gems are your own dependencies. If you want to add gems to your own Errbit, place them in a new file called UserGemfile. If you want to use a file with a different name, you can pass the name of that file in an environment variable named USER_GEMFILE. For example, if you wanted to use errbit_jira_plugin, you could:

echo "gem 'errbit_jira_plugin'" > UserGemfile
bundle install

Issue Trackers

Each issue tracker integration is implemented as a gem that depends on errbit_plugin. The only officially supported issue tracker plugin is errbit_github_plugin.

If you want to implement your own issue tracker plugin, read the README.md file at errbit_plugin.

Notification Service

Flowdock Notification

Allow notification to Flowdock. See complete documentation

What if Errbit has an error?

Errbit will log it's own errors to an internal app named Self.Errbit. The Self.Errbit app will be automatically created whenever the first error happens.

If your Errbit instance has logged an error, we would appreciate a bug report on GitHub Issues. You can post this manually at https://github.com/errbit/errbit/issues, or you can set up the GitHub Issues tracker for your Self.Errbit app:

• Go to the Self.Errbit app's edit page. If that app does not exist yet, go to the apps page and click Add a new App to create it. (You can also create it by running rake airbrake:test.)

• In the Issue Tracker section, click GitHub Issues.

• Fill in the Account/Repository field with errbit/errbit.

• Fill in the Username field with your github username.

• If you are logged in on GitHub, you can find your API Token on this page: https://github.com/account/admin.

• Save the settings by clicking Update App (or Add App)

• You can now easily post bug reports to GitHub Issues by clicking the Create Issue button on a Self.Errbit error.

Use Errbit with applications written in other languages

In theory, any Airbrake-compatible error catcher for other languages should work with Errbit. Solutions known to work are listed below:

PHP (>= 5.3) flippa/errbit-php OOP PHP (>= 5.3) emgiezet/errbitPHP Python mkorenkov/errbit.py , pulseenergy/airbrakepy

TODO

• Add ability for watchers to be configured for types of notifications they should receive

People using Errbit

See our wiki page for a list of people and companies around the world who use Errbit. Feel free to edit this page, and add your name and country to the list if you are using Errbit.

Special Thanks

• Michael Parenteau - For rocking the Errbit design and providing a great user experience.
• Nick Recobra (@oruen) - Nick is Errbit's first core contributor. He's been working hard at making Errbit more awesome.
• Nathan Broadbent (@ndbroadbent) - Maintaining Errbit and contributing many features
• Vasiliy Ermolovich (@nashby) - Contributing and helping to resolve issues and pull requests
• Marcin Ciunelis (@martinciu) - Helping to improve Errbit's architecture
• Cyril Mougel (@shingara) - Maintaining Errbit and contributing many features
• Relevance - For giving me Open-source Fridays to work on Errbit and all my awesome co-workers for giving feedback and inspiration.
• Thoughtbot - For being great open-source advocates and setting the bar with Airbrake.

See the contributors graph for further details.

Contributing to Errbit

See the contribution guidelines

Running tests

Check the .travis.yml file to see how tests are run

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010-2014 Errbit Team. See LICENSE for details.