How do I log the entire trace back of a Ruby exception using the default Rails logger?

Question

I am working on rails project and I am trying to get exceptions to be logged to the rails log files. I know I can call logger.error $! to get the first line of the exception logged to the file. But, I want to get the entire trace stack logged as well. How do I log the entire trace back of an exception using the default rails logger?

Answer 1

logger.error caller.join("\n") should do the trick.

Answer 2

logger.error $!, $!.backtrace

Also, don't forget you can

rescue ErrorType => error_name

to give your error a variable name other than the default $!.

Answer 3

The way rails does it is

137             logger.fatal(
138               "\n\n#{exception.class} (#{exception.message}):\n    " +
139               clean_backtrace(exception).join("\n    ") +
140               "\n\n"
141             )

248       def clean_backtrace(exception)
249         if backtrace = exception.backtrace
250           if defined?(RAILS_ROOT)
251             backtrace.map { |line| line.sub RAILS_ROOT, '' }
252           else
253             backtrace
254           end
255         end
256       end

Answer 4

In Rails, ActionController::Rescue deals with it. In my application controller actions, i'm using method log_error from this module to pretty-format backtrace in logs:

def foo_action
  # break something in here
rescue
  log_error($!)
  # call firemen
end

Answer 5

Here's how I would do it:

http://gist.github.com/127708

Here's the ri documentation for Exception#backtrace:

http://gist.github.com/127710

Note that you could also use Kernel#caller, which gives you the full trace (minus the curent frame) as well.

http://gist.github.com/127709

Also - Note that if you are trying to catch all exceptions, you should rescue from Exception, not RuntimeError.

Answer 6

In later versions of Rails, simply uncomment the following line in RAIL_ROOT/config/initializers/backtrace_silencers.rb (or add this file itself if it's not there):

# Rails.backtrace_cleaner.remove_silencers!

This way you get the full backtrace written to the log on an exception. This works for me in v2.3.4.