Introducing Errbit

Here at Relevance, we use Hoptoad for tracking exceptions in our Rails apps. It's great because it gives us a heads up when something goes wrong but it doesn't bury us with tons of email. So, when we found out we couldn't use it on one of our client's apps due to firewall and data confidentiality requirements, we were naturally upset, but we worked around it.

We ended up using a mix of Chatterbox and CapGun to track exceptions and deployments. While this works great, it requires a bit more configuration and doesn't have some of the features that we're used to with Hoptoad. What's a developer to do?

Needing a new project to work on for my Open Source Fridays, I decided to try to tackle this problem. As a result, I'm excited to announce Errbit, the open source, self-hosted error catcher.

Errbit is API-compatible with Hoptoad. This means you can just configure your Hoptoad notifier to send errors to your Errbit server.

It is a pretty standard Rails 3 app that uses MongoDB+Mongoid for the persistence layer. If you have experience with MongoDB and deploying Rails apps, it shouldn't be too much of a learning curve to get up and running.

Take it for a spin and let us know what you think. In the spirit of open source, feel free to fork it, contribute features, or white label it for a more personalized look that your clients will recognize.

Big thanks to Michael Parenteau for his awesome design work on the UI and of course to Relevance for giving me Fridays to make cool stuff.

Note: After developing Errbit, we discovered that Hoptoad does offer a "Hoptoad behind your firewall" solution. Definitely check it out if you want a fully supported exception notifier that has to sit behind a firewall.

Screenshots