Rails Flytrap

Flytrap is an exception handler for Rails JSON APIs with the intention of making error handling very simple.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rails-flytrap'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rails-flytrap

Usage

To use Flytrap, just include the Flytrap module in your base API controller to set it up as an exception handler.

class ApplicationController
  include Flytrap
end

Once you have that set up, any class that extends Flytrap::Exception will be caught and spit out in JSON!

For example, if you have:

class DummyException < Flytrap::Exception
  self.status_code = 500 # The status code to be returned alongside the JSON output
  self.message = 'Oops! Something broke!' # A developer-friendly message
  self.code = 1 # An arbitrary code for you to identify errors from your front-end!
end

and some error flow in a controller:

class SomeController < ApplicationController
  def index
    raise DummyException.new if dummy?
    render json: { foo: 'bar' }
  end
end

Then if dummy? returns true, the output you get is:

{
  "error": {
    "message": "Oops! Something broke!",
    "code": 1,
    "class_name": "DummyException"
  }
}

with, of course, your 500 status code!

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/ilanusse/rails-flytrap.