Harness Your Deployment Superpowers With Honeybadger's Orb For CircleCI

Palantir orbs, the Globe of Peace, Thief Raid, Trine, Prophecy Records, Ood Translators — the list of important orbs throughout history is quite long. However, the Honeybadger orb for CircleCI gives you deployment super powers. Do those other “important” orbs offer this feature? I didn’t think so!

The Honeybadger Orb

Using Honeybadger’s orb allows your team to easily track deployments as part of your workflow. Keeping track of deployments in Honeybadger gives you a heads-up when code changes cause problems, helping you avoid situations where you "fire and forget" on a Friday afternoon... and cause an outage that lasts all weekend. Once added to your workflow, our orb will automatically include the SHA of the revision that was deployed, which we link in the Honeybadger UI to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, so you can see at a glance what got deployed and when.

Easy Integration

To use this orb in your project, you need to enable two settings:

• Settings -> Security -> Allow uncertified orbs
• Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Enable build processing (preview)

Complete installation and configuration instructions can be found here.

Deployment Notifications

Sending deployment notifications to Honeybadger allows your team to associate spikes in errors to changes that were deployed.

You can add a job definition to circle.yml that invokes the notify_deploy command from this orb:

jobs:
  test:
    ...

  deploy:
    docker:
       - image: circleci/ruby:2.5.3-node-browsers
    steps:
      - run:
          ...
      - honeybadger/notify_deploy:
          api_key: YOUR_HONEYBADGER_API_KEY

Then include that job in your workflow:

workflows:
  test:
    jobs:
      - test
      - deploy:
          requires:
            - test

This will invoke the deploy job after the test job is completed.

Source Map Uploads

If you are tracking your Javascript errors with Honeybadger, our orb can also upload your source maps to our API every time your assets are compiled. Having those source maps uploaded as your app is deployed is incredibly helpful when you get a Javascript error in your app. Instead of getting a backtrace with minified, obfuscated code references, you'll get a backtrace with the original code as you wrote it. You'll be able to find and fix those Javascript bugs in no time.

The upload_sourcemap command can be used in your workflow to send source maps to Honeybadger after they are generated by your build tools:

jobs:
  test:
    ...

  deploy:
    docker:
       - image: circleci/ruby:2.5.3-node-browsers
    steps:
      - run:
          ...
      - honeybadger/upload_sourcemap:
          api_key: YOUR_HONEYBADGER_API_KEY
          minified_url: https://example.com/assets/application.min.js
          minified_file: path/to/application.min.js
          source_map: path/to/application.js.map

Wrapping Up

Take your CircleCI deployments to the next level with the Honeybadger orb (A.K.A. The Most Important Orb Ever). Give it a try and let us know what you think!