Independent Study Spring 2019/Errbit

Set up an open-source error monitoring tool instead of Airbrake

Useful links

Github Pull Request

Errbit

Purpose

Errbit has been set-up, replacing the already existing Airbrake API to serve several purposes like :

• Errbit is a much more powerful monitoring tool
• Errbit is Airbrake API compliant
• Store unresolved errors indefinitely without any extra cost.

Components

• Errbit
• Expertiza
• MongoDB

The Steps taken for the setup

There were several steps taken to set-up Errbit for Expertiza and schedule it to automatically pull changed from its forked branch and deploy:

Setup Heroku

• Made an account with Email: expertiza-support@lists.ncsu.edu and Password: expertiza2019@

Setup Errbit

• Fork Errbit from https://github.com/errbit/errbit and follow the steps mentioned on README.md
• When we run "rake db:seed" it will create an admin user with a random password. We can see these login credential in the console log. But instead, we can provide this username and password explicitly by just making some changes in errbit/db/seed.rb file. Eg:

  def admin_email
     return 'expertiza-support@lists.ncsu.edu' if heroku_pr_review_app?
    "expertiza-support@lists.ncsu.edu"
  end
  def admin_pass
   return 'errbit' if heroku_pr_review_app?
   @admin_pass ||= "errbit"
  end

• Seed the DB (NOTE: No bootstrap task is used on Heroku!).

 heroku run rake db:seed

Deploy Errbit on Heroku

• Created a new empty application on Heroku and named it errbit-expertiza2019
• The app will have an associated empty git repository https://git.heroku.com/errbit-expertiza2019.git

Took the following steps in the /errbit repository on local machine:

• Login to Heroku using Herkou CLI from your console

  heroku login

• Added remote

  heroku git:remote -a  errbit-expertiza2019

• As errbit needs MongoDB database backend so need to install MongoDB addon in Heroku. We can use heroku command to create an addon.

  heroku addons:add mongolab:sandbox 

  heroku config:add HEROKU=true 

To periodically clear resolved errors to free up space, With the cron add-on:Install the heroku cron addon, to clear resolved errors daily:

  heroku addons:add cron:daily

Run the following to deploy.

  git add . 
  git commit -m “new creds” 
  git push heroku master 

Configure Expertiza to point to our deployed Errbit application

• Create a new app on Errbit named Expertiza
• Copy its configuration and place it in the expertiza/config/initializers/airbrake.rb file.

  Airbrake.configure do |config|
 config.host = 'https://errbit-expertiza2019.herokuapp.com'
 config.project_id = 1 # required, but any positive integer works
 config.project_key = '64ed97f0c8e628acefb3a7f63308a11c'
 # Uncomment for Rails apps
  config.environment = Rails.env
  config.ignore_environments = %w(test)
 end

On starting the server, the errors would now be caught by Errbit.

Set up Cron job to regularly pull changes from upstream/master into the forked repository and deploy on Heroku.

• Add the original GitHub repository as a "remote" called upstream to Errbit
• Add the empty Git repository made during app creation on Heroku as a "remote" called "production".

In the .git/config, add:

   [remote "upstream"]¬
     url = https://github.com/errbit/errbit.git¬
     fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/upstream/*¬
   [remote "production"]¬
     url = https://git.heroku.com/errbit-expertiza2019.git¬
     fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/heroku/*¬

• Setup tasks to fetch from upstream and rebase and then push to Heroku.
• Task to migrate the database into production
• To deploy using these tasks, run:

  rake deploy:production DEPLOY_BRANCH=production

You could access the app using:

  https://errbit-expertiza2019.herokuapp.com/
  UserName: expertiza-support@lists.ncsu.edu
  Password: errbit

Errbit Interface

• Deployment of Errbit on Heroku, showing successful build.

• Login to Errbit using the admin credentials we specified.

• Create a new App on Errbit to catch Errors for Expertiza

• Errors from Expertiza are caught in this manner and displayed.

• Similar errors are grouped together.