This is a back-port of Ruby 2.1.0's Exception#cause to older versions of Ruby.

Add gem 'cause' to your Gemfile, then run bundle install. If you're not using bundler, then just gem install cause.

Just continue programming as normal. When you rescue from exceptions they'll have a third property, cause, in addition to backtrace and message. The cause is the exception object that was being handled when the error was raised.

While this is not directly useful in normal programming, it's very useful for debugging. Exception trackers like Bugsnag can then pick up the cause of the exception to help you find out what went wrong.

At the moment you cannot set the cause yourself. Overriding raise is hairy business and I wrote this gem late at night, but with sufficient care it's probably doable.

This gem is Copyright under the MIT licence. See LICENCE.MIT for details.

Contributions and bug-reports are welcome.