Core dump equivalent for the Rails exception

Question

So I got an exception log from my application. I have a call stack, request parameters and all other usual stuff in that log. This is a rare exception and info from the log doesn't contain all details I need to resolve / duplicate the problem.

I wonder if there is some way (gem?) to get full dump of Rails application state in case of an exception. Including all instance and local variables values from a controller methods. I guess that dump of whole Ruby object space might take even a minute or so but I don't care about disk and cpu resources in a such case.

Answer 1

I don't think so, the way I go about trying to do something like that is by using logger.error on the variables that i need more on info on.

Answer 2

If possible, it's also not a bad idea to try running it with ruby-debug (instructions here). All you would need to do is insert a call to debugger right before the error would be triggered or stick it in a rescue clause.

Answer 3

I am unaware of any method to get the application state.

One thing I do upon occassion is install netbeans which has a graphical debugger. You can hover over variables to see their values, easily walk the stack, and also have the exception trigger the debugger, rather than a breakpoint.