airbrake

Node.js client for airbrakeapp.com, formerly known as hoptoadapp.com.

Install

npm install airbrake

Basic usage

The common use case for this module is to catch all 'uncaughtException' events on the process object and send them to airbrake:

var airbrake = require('airbrake').createClient("your api key");
airbrake.handleExceptions();

throw new Error('I am an uncaught exception');

Please note that the above will re-throw the exception after it has been successfully delivered to airbrake, caushing your process to exit with status 1.

If you want more control over the delivery of your errors, you can also manually submit errors to airbrake.

var airbrake = require('airbrake').createClient("your api key");
var err = new Error('Something went terribly wrong');
airbrake.notify(err, function(err, url) {
  if (err) throw err;

  // Error has been delivered, url links to the error in airbrake
});

Usage with Express

A custom error handler will need to be set for Express:

var airbrake = require('airbrake').createClient("your api key");
app.error(airbrake.expressHandler())

This has been verified with Express 2.X

Screenshot

This screenshot shows an airbrake error send from this module:

Features

• Automatically add process.env as well as other information when sending notifications
• Detect and fix circular references in error context information
• Support for all features of the 2.1 notification API
• Support for long-stack-traces
• Optional auto-handler for uncaughtException events
• Provides notification url linking to airbrake in notify() callback
• Timeout airbrake requests after 30 seconds, you never know

Adding context to errors

The notify() method automatically adds the following context information to each delivered error:

• error.class: (err.type string if set, or 'Error')
• error.message: (err.message string)
• error.backtrace: (err.stack as parsed by stack-trace)
• request.url: (err.url, see airbrake.url);
• request.component: (err.component string if set);
• request.action: (err.action string if set);
• request.cgi-data: (process.env, merged all other properties of err)
• request.params: (err.params object if set)
• request.session: (err.session object if set)
• server-environment.project-root: (airbrake.projectRoot string if set)
• server-environment.environment-name: (airbrake.env string)
• server-environment.app-version: (`airbrake.appVersion string if set)
• server-environment.hostname: (airbrake.hostname string if set)

You can add additional context information by modifying the error properties listed above:

var airbrake = require('airbrake').createClient("your api key");
var http = require('http');

http.createServer(function(req, res) {
  if (req.headers['X-Secret'] !== 'my secret') {
    var err = new Error('403 - Permission denied');
    req.writeHead(403);
    req.end(err.message);

    err.url = req.url;
    err.params = {ip: req.socket.remoteAddress};
    airbrake.notify(err);
  }
});

Unfortunately uncaughtException events cannot be traced back to particular requests, so you should still try to handle errors where they occur.

Removing context from errors

In some scenarios you might want to filter some context to never show up in Airbrake. For example you might have a private key loaded in your environment memory, or your user has some critical data in his session, and you want to hide that.

This can be done by hooking into the 'vars' event like so:

airbrake.on('vars', function(type, vars) {
  if (type === 'cgi-data') {
    delete vars.SECRET;
  }
});

Tracking deployments

This client supports airbrake's deployment tracking:

var airbrake = require('airbrake').createClient("your api key");
var deployment = {
  rev: '98103a8fa850d5eaf3666e419d8a0a93e535b1b2',
  repo: '[email protected]:felixge/node-airbrake.git',
};

airbrake.trackDeployment(deployment, function(err, params) {
  if (err) {
    throw err;
  }

  console.log('Tracked deployment of %s to %s', params.rev, params.env);
});

Check out the airbrake.trackDeployment() API docs below for a list of all options.

API

Airbreak.createClient(apiKey, [env])

Returns a new Airbrake instance.

airbrake.key = null

The API key to use.

airbrake.env = process.env.NODE_ENV || 'development'

The name of the server environment this is running in.

airbrake.host = 'http://' + os.hostname()

The base url for errors. If err.url is not set, airbrake.host is used instead. If err.url is a relative url starting with '/', it is appended to airbrake.host. If err.url is an absolute url, airbrake.host is ignored.

airbrake.projectRoot = null

The root directory of this project.

airbrake.appVersion = null

The version of this app. Set to a semantic version number, or leave unset.

airbrake.protocol = 'http'

The protocol to use.

airbrake.developmentEnvironments = []

Do not post to Airbrake when running in these environments.

airbrake.timeout = 30 * 1000

The timeout after which to give up trying to notify airbrake in ms.

airbrake.handleExceptions()

Registers a process.on('uncaughtException') listener. When an uncaught exception occurs, the error is send to airbrake, and then re-thrown to kill the process.

airbrake.notify(err, [cb])

Sends the given err to airbrake.

The callback parameter receives two arguments, err, url. err is set if the delivery to airbrake failed.

If no cb is given, and the delivery fails, an error event is emitted. If there is no listener for this event, node will kill the process as well. This is done to avoid silent error delivery failure.

airbrake.trackDeployment([params, [cb]])

Notifies airbrake about a deployment. params is an object with the following options:

• env: The environment being deployed, defaults to airbrake.env.
• user: The user doing the deployment, defaults to process.env.USER.
• repo: The github url of this repository. Defaults to ''.
• rev: The revision of this deployment. Defaults to ''.

Alternative modules

This module is meant as a replacement for hoptoad-notifier, which does not support all features of the 2.1 API.

Contribute

Besides bug fixes, I'd be happy to accept patches for:

• Automatically parsing repo and rev from the local git repository when calling airbrake.trackDeployment(). This can be done via exec(), but must not be done when specifying repo / rev by hand, or if they are set to false.

If you have other feature ideas, please open an issue first, so we can discuss it.

License

airbrake is licensed under the MIT license.