Errbit

The open source, self-hosted error catcher

Errbit is a tool for collecting and managing errors from other applications. It is Airbrake 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.

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.

Install MongoDB
git clone https://github.com/errbit/errbit.git
bundle install
bundle exec rake errbit:bootstrap
bundle exec rails server

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=true
Register your instance of Errbit at https://github.com/settings/applications

If you host 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 you’re working with an App that has a GitHub repo configured, then you will be able to create issues on GitHub. If you use another issue tracker, see Issue Trackers.

You can change the OAuth scope Errbit requests from GitHub by setting GITHUB_ACCESS_SCOPE. The default [‘repo’] is very permissive, but there are a few others that could make sense for your needs:

GITHUB_ACCESS_SCOPE=”[‘repo’]”: Allow creating issues for public and private repos
GITHUB_ACCESS_SCOPE=”[‘public_repo’]”: Allow creating issues for public repos only
GITHUB_ACCESS_SCOPE=”[]”: No permissions at all, but allows errbit login through github

GITHUB_ORG_ID is an optional environment variable you can set to your own github organization id. If set, only users of the specified GitHub organization can log in to Errbit through GitHub. Errbit will provision accounts for new users.

Configuring LDAP authentication:

Set USER_HAS_USERNAME=true
Follow the instructions at https://github.com/cschiewek/devise_ldap_authenticatable to set up the devise_ldap_authenticatable gem.
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 0.3 to 0.4

All configuration is now done through the environment. See configuration
Ruby 1.9 and 2.0 are no longer offically supported. Please upgrade to Ruby 2.1+
Errbit now maintains an issue tracker only for github. If you’re using another issue tracker integration, you may need to maintain it yourself. See (issue trackers)[#issue-trackers]

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.

The Airbrake gem will look for current_user or current_member. By defailt it will only send the id of the user, to specify other attributes you can set config.user_attributes. See the Airbrake wiki for more information.

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

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 the airbrake-js javascript library.

Install airbrake-js according to the docs at airbrake-js and set your project and host as early as possible:

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

Using custom fingerprinting methods

Errbit collates errors into groups using a fingerprinting strategy. If you find your errors are not getting grouped the way you would expect, you may need to implement your own strategy. A fingerprinting strategy is just a class that implements a ::generate class method. See the classes in app/models/fingerprint/ if you need some inspiration. You can install it with an initializer like:

# config/initializers/fingerprint.rb
ErrorReport.fingerprint_strategy = MyStrategy

Plugins and Integrations

You can extend Errbit by adding Ruby gems and plugins which are typically 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 and Errbit will treat that file as an additional Gemfile. 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. If you want to use errbit_jira_plugin, just add it to UserGemfile:

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.

What if Errbit has an error?

Errbit will log it’s own errors to an internal app named Self.Errbit. The Self.Errbit app is automatically created when 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](https://github.com/flippa/errbit-php)
OOP PHP (>= 5.3)	[emgiezet/errbitPHP](https://github.com/emgiezet/errbitPHP)
Python	[mkorenkov/errbit.py](https://github.com/mkorenkov/errbit.py) , [pulseenergy/airbrakepy](https://github.com/pulseenergy/airbrakepy)

People using Errbit

See our wiki page for a list of people and companies around the world who use Errbit. You may 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 more details.

Contributing to Errbit

See the contribution guidelines

Running tests

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