Exception#cause in Ruby 2.1

One of my favourite things about Ruby is that they release new versions on Christmas day! This year 2.1 came out with a range of neat features, but the most exciting from our point of view is the new cause method on Exception objects.

The cause method tells you the original problem that was being handled when this exception was raised.

Raising Application-Specific Exceptions

Knowing the cause of an exception is incredibly useful when you deliberately raise a more descriptive exception inside your error handler; as described by Avdi Grimm:

begin
 # ...
rescue KeyError
 raise MyLib::Error, "Bad key: #{key}. Valid keys are: #{valid_keys}"
end

Rails’ ActionView does something similar when an exception occurs in a view helper. The original exception is wrapped in an ActionView::Template::Error, and made available through the original_exception method so that you can tell quickly where the problem was.

Debugging Crashes in Your Exception Handlers

Exception#cause is also very useful for diagnosing bugs in your exception handlers. If your exception handler has a bug, a second exception will be raised to tell you about the bug. For example:

begin
 # ...
rescue
 # Bug which throws a NoMethodError in your exception handler
 nil.some_method
end

Before Exception#cause this second exception would completely hide the first, making it almost impossible to figure out why your program crashed originally.

Bugsnag Supports Exception#cause

The Bugsnag user interface has supported showing exception causes since day one. This was predominantly to support languages that already had a similar feature, like Java’s getCause() and Rails’ ActionView::Template::Error.

Now that Ruby 2.1 provides a standard mechanism for showing the causes of exceptions, we’ve updated our ruby notifier to automatically collect and display these causes. You can get the latest version with bundle update bugsnag.

Using Exception#cause With Older Ruby Versions

If you’re not yet using Ruby 2.1 you can get all the benefits of Exception#cause by installing the cause gem. It provides a backport of the cause method to ruby 1.8.7 and above so that if your error handlers ever crash, or you want to make use of descriptive error classes, you can still debug the original problem effectively.