Defra Ruby Alert

Currently there are a number of Rails based digital services in Defra, all of which use Airbrake to report exceptions to instances of Errbit we have running.

This means we are often duplicating the code to configure and manage Airbrake across them. So we created this gem 😁!

Its aim is to help us

• start to reduce the duplication across projects
• be consistent in how we configure and manage Airbrake

This gem is intended to replace directly referencing and managing the Airbrake gem in our services. However our services require different versions of Airbrake due to the versions of Ruby they depend on. So if like the Flood Risk Activity Exemptions service you are using Ruby 2.3 and need Airbrake version 5.3 add this line to your application's Gemfile

gem "defra_ruby_alert", "~> 0.1.0"

If like the Waste Exemptions and Waste Carriers services you are using Ruby 2.4 and need Airbrake version 5.8 add this line to your application's Gemfile

gem "defra_ruby_alert", "~> 1.0.0"

If you need a version of the gem that works with Ruby 2.7 and Rails 6, and has version 10.0.4 of Airbrake (latest versions at time of writing) add this line to your application's Gemfile

gem "defra_ruby_alert", "~> 2.0.0"

And then update your dependencies by calling

bundle install

There is a bunch of stuff that can be configured for Airbrake. But as part of trying to keep things consistent we only expose the stuff we expect to change across services.

As a minimum you need to let the gem know the host uri for the Errbit instance, and the project key to log exceptions against. You also need to enable it.

This is because Airbrake errors if project_key is not set. The problem is that the initializer is fired in scenarios where we are not actually using the app, for example when running a rake task. A common case is during deployment when generating assets. As such the gem disables Airbrake unless you tell it to enable it.

# config/initializers/defra_ruby_alert.rb
require "defra_ruby/alert"

DefraRuby::Alert.configure do |config|
  config.enabled = true
  config.host = "http://errbit.mydomain.com"
  config.project_key = "SomeScaryLookingLongStringMadeUpOfLettersAndNumbers"
end

The gem has been designed to be used by our Rails apps, so we would also expect the following to be set (though its not required)

  config.root_directory = Rails.root
  config.logger = Rails.logger
  config.environment = Rails.env

Specifies which keys in the payload (parameters, session data, environment data, etc) should be filtered. Before sending an error, filtered keys will be substituted with the [Filtered] label.

Not every project uses this, but some do hence we provide the ability to specify a blocklist.

  config.blocklist = [/password/i, /postcode/i, :name]

See Airbrake's blocklist_keys for more details.

Having configured the gem, you simply need to tell it to start Airbrake.

# config/initializers/defra_ruby_alert.rb
require "defra_ruby/alert"

DefraRuby::Alert.configure do |config|
  # ...
end

DefraRuby::Alert.start

It probably would have made more sense to name this gem defra_ruby_airbrake as that's all it's really dealing with. However we encountered numerous namespace issues in our first attempts. So rather than run the risk of always encountering those kind of issues, we just picked a different name.

Naming things is hard!

If you have an idea you'd like to contribute please log an issue.

All contributions should be submitted via a pull request.

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