Developer's Best Friend: Hoptoad

If you are a Ruby-on-Rails developer (or merb, for that matter), then I have got great news for you. Hoptoad is here to provide you with free, INTELLIGENT error notification, and it's super-easy. I read about them this morning, and have already installed and tested their plugin with my rails app; my evaluation: 10/10. All you do is sign up for a free account with hoptoad. Then you have to install their plugin in your rails app. Here's where I ran into my only speed bump: I tried to use their recommended process of running the command "sudo ruby script/install plugin [url to project]" but it always failed saying it couldn't find this plugin. I don't know what I was doing wrong there, but it doesn't matter now. I just downloaded the latest version from their public repository on github, and dropped the folder into the plugins directory of my rails application. Then after adding the following configuration file [RAILS_ROOT/config/initializers/hoptoad.rb]:

HoptoadNotifier.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = '[YOUR API KEY]'
end

I was up and running. I ran the included rake task to test the plugin:

> rake hoptoad:test

and immediately had a new error logged on my account on hoptoad. From there I can choose to have it send me emails for each error, or subscribe to the errors in my RSS reader. Piece of cake! The best part? I don't get a single email for each exception (No more inbox flooding). Hoptoad will count and collect similar errors, and will notify you of each PROBLEM, not of each individual exception. Great thinking! There are additional configuration options available if you want to filter which errors you get notified about, and there's also an API you can program against to subscribe to your errors in interesting ways or to post errors from non-rails projects, really it's open to anything you want to do. To the creators of Hoptoad: Great Job guys. To current Non-Users of Hoptoad: What are you waiting for?