The Honeybadger Developer Blog

Understanding the Ruby exception hierarchy

In this post we look at Ruby's exception class heirarchy, and how you can use it to be as broad or as narrow as you like when rescuing exceptions.

Custom exceptions in Ruby

Exceptions are classes, just like everything else in Ruby. This post will show you how to create your own custom exceptions without falling into some common traps that snare beginners.

Capturing stdout & stderr from shell commands via Ruby

tl;dr If you want to run a shell command from Ruby and capture its stdout, stderr and return status, check out the Open3.capture3 method. If you'd like to process stdout and stderr data in a streaming fashion, check out Open3.popen3.

So many bad choices

Ruby's Exception vs StandardError: What's the difference?

Never rescue Exception in Ruby! - Maybe you've heard this before. It's good advice, but it's pretty confusing unless you're already in the know. Let's break this statement down and see what it means.

How to globally disable rdoc and ri during gem installs

Gem installs can be slooow. One of the biggest culprits is documentation. Every time you install a gem, your computer has to scan the source of that gem and generate documentation.

This can be useful if you often need to check gem documentation when...

Announcing the New Honeybadger iOS App

Have you ever wished you could use honeybadger on your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch? Well now you can.

We're super excited to announce the release of the official Honeybadger app for iOS.

With this new app you'll get flexible push notifications for...

Testing object allocations with RSpec

Everyone is talking about Ruby performance lately, and with good reason. It turns out that with some smallish tweaks to your code it's possible to increase performance by up to 99.9%.

There are plenty of articles out there on how to optimize your...

A more visible backtrace & cleaner error summary

Last week we sent out a survey to our users asking them what changes they would make to Honeybadger. We're planning on redesigning the user interface and wanted some feedback.

As we read through the responses it became clear that a lot of the things...

Introducing the new 2.x Honeybadger gem

After nearly six months of effort that nearly cost us the sanity of our beloved Joshua Wood, we are proud to officially announce the release of version 2.x of the Honeybadger gem. Upgrade instructions are here.

If you're thinking to yourself, "Wait...

Incoming: uptime monitoring WebHooks

When your site is totally unresponsive (i.e. down), it's a big deal. Oddly enough, application errors may not surface during major outages if the failure is outside of the application. That's why we built uptime monitoring into Honeybadger: in addition...