Major Client Update For Elixir

This month we released a new version of our hex package, which includes a major refactor of the internal client logic as well as some new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

We're super excited to share the release of honeybadger v0.7 with you! Here are the highlights:

Better Async Handling

The Honeybadger client now uses a separate process (via GenServer) to report errors in the background, instead of spawning new tasks. A supervision tree is started with the client as a child.

We think this is a much better way to do asynchronous work like ours, and it should result in improved performance in applications which report a lot of errors. Check out the Pull Request.

Improved Phoenix Support

Errors reported from Plug now automatically include the controller and action name from Phoenix.

This was previously possible by including our Plug directly in each controller, but not if you added it to the Phoenix router, which is a much nicer way to get error reporting in all Phoenix controllers:

defmodule MyPhoenixApp.Router do
  use Crywolf.Web, :router
  use Honeybadger.Plug

  pipeline :browser do
    [...]
  end
end

The controller name is also used to help group similar errors in the Honeybadger UI, so this update should make error grouping more logical in some applications. Check out the Pull Request.

New Ways to Notify

The client now supports sending more arbitrary errors to Honeybadger. For instance, you can call Honeybadger.notify/1 with a string or a map:

# With just an error message:
Honeybadger.notify("oops!")

# With a map:
Honeybadger.notify(%{
  class: "CustomError",
  message: "oops!"
})

Check out the Pull Request.

Smarter Stack Traces

When calling Honeybadger.notify with custom arguments, the accuracy of the generated stack trace has been improved. Check out the Pull Request.

Test Your Configuration

We've added a new mix task which can be invoked with mix honeybadger.test. When invoked, the task will report a test exception to your Honeybadger project, verifying that your application is configured correctly. Check out the Pull Request.

Bug Fixes, Etc.

Last but not least, we fixed a bunch of bugs and made even more improvements, making v0.7 the most stable release yet.

Check out the CHANGELOG for a full list of fixes included in this release.

A Special Thanks

I would like to specially thank Parker Selbert (@sorentwo), who was a major contributor to the v0.7 release. Thanks Parker, this release wouldn't have been possible without you!