Rails Error Dashboard

Self-hosted Rails error monitoring — free, forever.

Own your errors. Own your stack. Zero monthly fees.

A fully open-source, self-hosted error dashboard for solo founders, indie hackers, and small teams who want complete control without the SaaS bills.

gem 'rails_error_dashboard'

5-minute setup · Works out-of-the-box · 100% Rails + Postgres · No vendor lock-in

🎮 Try the Live Demo

See it in action: https://rails-error-dashboard.anjan.dev

Username: gandalf · Password: youshallnotpass

Experience the full dashboard with 250+ realistic Rails errors, LOTR-themed demo data, and all features enabled.

⚠️ BETA SOFTWARE

This Rails Engine is in beta and under active development. While functional and tested (850+ tests passing), the API may change before v1.0.0. Use in production at your own discretion.

Supports: Rails 7.0 - 8.1 | Ruby 3.2+

🎯 Who This Is For

✓ Solo bootstrappers who need professional error tracking without recurring costs

✓ Indie SaaS founders building profitable apps on tight budgets

✓ Small dev teams (2-5 people) who hate SaaS bloat

✓ Privacy-conscious apps that need to keep error data on their own servers

✓ Side projects that might become real businesses

💰 What It Replaces

Before	After
Pay $29-99/month for error monitoring	$0/month - runs on your existing Rails server
Send sensitive error data to third parties	Keep all data on your infrastructure
Fight with SaaS pricing tiers and limits	Unlimited errors, unlimited projects
Vendor lock-in with proprietary APIs	100% open source, fully portable
Complex setup with SDKs and external services	5-minute Rails Engine installation

🚀 Why Choose Rails Error Dashboard

"Install once, own it forever"

✅ Zero recurring costs - One-time setup, runs on your existing infrastructure
✅ 5-minute installation - Mount the Rails Engine, run migrations, done
✅ Works immediately - Automatic error capture from Rails controllers, jobs, models
✅ Beautiful UI - Professional dashboard you can show to clients
✅ Full control - Your data stays on your server, modify anything you want
✅ No surprises - Open source MIT license, no hidden fees or limits

Built for developers who:

Want professional error monitoring without the SaaS tax
Need to debug production issues without paying per error
Value data privacy and server ownership
Prefer simple, Rails-native solutions

✨ Features

Core Features (Always Enabled)

🎯 Complete Error Tracking

Automatic error capture from Rails controllers, jobs, and middleware. Frontend & mobile support for React, React Native, Vue, Angular, Flutter. Platform detection (iOS/Android/Web/API), user context tracking, full stack traces.

📊 Beautiful Dashboard

Modern Bootstrap 5 UI with dark/light mode, responsive design, real-time statistics, search and filtering, fast pagination. Overview dashboard with critical alerts, error trend charts, and platform health summary.

📈 Analytics & Insights

7-day trend charts, severity breakdown, spike detection, resolution rate tracking, user impact analysis. Comprehensive analytics page with hourly patterns, mobile vs API breakdowns, and top affected users.

🔧 Workflow Management

Error assignment and status tracking, priority levels (critical/high/medium/low), snooze functionality, comment threads, batch operations (bulk resolve/delete), resolution tracking with references.

🔒 Security & Privacy

HTTP Basic Auth, environment-based settings, optional separate database for isolation. Your data stays on your server - no third-party access.

Optional Features (Choose During Install)

🚨 Multi-Channel Notifications

Slack - Rich formatted messages with error context and direct dashboard links
Email - HTML formatted alerts with full error details
Discord - Embedded messages with severity color coding
PagerDuty - Critical error escalation with incident management
Webhooks - Custom integrations with any service (JSON payloads)

⚡ Performance Optimizations

Async Logging - Non-blocking error capture using ActiveJob (Sidekiq/SolidQueue/Async)
Error Sampling - Reduce storage by sampling high-frequency errors
Backtrace Limiting - Save 70-90% storage with smart truncation
Separate Database - Isolate error data for better performance
Database Indexes - Composite indexes and PostgreSQL GIN full-text search

🧠 Advanced Analytics (8 Powerful Features)

1. Baseline Anomaly Alerts 🔔 Automatically detect unusual error rate spikes using statistical analysis (mean + std dev). Get proactive notifications when errors exceed expected baselines with intelligent cooldown to avoid alert fatigue.

2. Fuzzy Error Matching 🔍 Find similar errors across different error hashes using Jaccard similarity (70%) and Levenshtein distance (30%). Discover related errors that share common root causes even when they manifest differently.

3. Co-occurring Errors 🔗 Detect errors that happen together within configurable time windows (default: 5 minutes). Identify patterns where one error frequently triggers another, helping you prioritize fixes.

4. Error Cascade Detection ⛓️ Identify error chains (A causes B causes C) with probability calculations and average delays. Visualize parent→child relationships to understand cascading failures and fix root causes.

5. Error Correlation Analysis 📊 Correlate errors with app versions, git commits, and users. Find problematic releases, identify users affected by multiple error types, and detect time-based patterns.

6. Platform Comparison 📱 Compare iOS vs Android vs Web health metrics side-by-side. Platform-specific error rates, severity distributions, resolution times, and stability scores (0-100).

7. Occurrence Pattern Detection 📈 Detect cyclical patterns (business hours, nighttime, weekend rhythms) and error bursts (many errors in short time). Understand when and how your errors happen.

8. Developer Insights 💡 AI-powered insights with severity detection, platform stability scoring, actionable recommendations, and recent error activity summaries.

🔌 Plugin System

Extensible architecture with event hooks (on_error_logged, on_error_resolved, on_threshold_exceeded). Built-in examples for Jira integration, metrics tracking, audit logging. Easy to create custom plugins - just drop a file in config/initializers/error_dashboard_plugins/.

📚 View complete feature list with examples →

📦 Quick Start

1. Add to Gemfile

gem 'rails_error_dashboard'

2. Install with Interactive Setup

bundle install
rails generate rails_error_dashboard:install
rails db:migrate

The installer will guide you through optional feature selection:

Notifications (Slack, Email, Discord, PagerDuty, Webhooks)
Performance (Async Logging, Error Sampling, Separate Database)
Advanced Analytics (8 powerful features including baseline alerts, fuzzy matching, platform comparison)

All features are opt-in - choose what you need during installation, or enable/disable them later in the initializer.

This will:

Create config/initializers/rails_error_dashboard.rb with your selected features
Copy database migrations
Mount the engine at /error_dashboard

3. Visit your dashboard

Start your server and visit:

http://localhost:3000/error_dashboard

Default credentials:

Username: gandalf
Password: youshallnotpass

⚠️ Change these before production! Edit config/initializers/rails_error_dashboard.rb

4. Test it out

Trigger a test error to see it in action:

# In Rails console or any controller
raise "Test error from Rails Error Dashboard!"

The error will appear instantly in your dashboard with full context, backtrace, and platform information.

📘 Full installation guide →

🗑️ Uninstalling

Need to remove Rails Error Dashboard? We've made it simple with both automated and manual options:

# Automated uninstall (recommended)
rails generate rails_error_dashboard:uninstall

# Keep error data, remove code
rails generate rails_error_dashboard:uninstall --keep-data

# Show manual instructions only
rails generate rails_error_dashboard:uninstall --manual-only

The uninstaller will:

✅ Show exactly what will be removed
✅ Ask for confirmation before making changes
✅ Remove initializer, routes, and migrations
✅ Optionally drop database tables (with double confirmation)
✅ Provide clear next steps

📘 Complete uninstall guide →

⚙️ Configuration

Opt-in Feature System

Rails Error Dashboard uses an opt-in architecture - core features (error capture, dashboard UI, analytics) are always enabled, while everything else is disabled by default.

Tier 1 Features (Always ON):

✅ Error capture (controllers, jobs, middleware)
✅ Dashboard UI with search and filtering
✅ Real-time updates
✅ Analytics and trend charts

Optional Features (Choose During Install):

📧 Multi-channel notifications (Slack, Email, Discord, PagerDuty, Webhooks)
⚡ Performance optimizations (Async logging, Error sampling)
📊 Advanced analytics (Baseline alerts, Fuzzy matching, Platform comparison, and more)

Basic Configuration

Edit config/initializers/rails_error_dashboard.rb:

RailsErrorDashboard.configure do |config|
  # ============================================================================
  # AUTHENTICATION (Always Required)
  # ============================================================================
  config.dashboard_username = ENV.fetch('ERROR_DASHBOARD_USER', 'gandalf')
  config.dashboard_password = ENV.fetch('ERROR_DASHBOARD_PASSWORD', 'youshallnotpass')

  # ============================================================================
  # OPTIONAL FEATURES (Enable as needed)
  # ============================================================================

  # Slack notifications (if enabled during install)
  config.enable_slack_notifications = true
  config.slack_webhook_url = ENV['SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL']

  # Email notifications (if enabled during install)
  config.enable_email_notifications = true
  config.notification_email_recipients = ["dev@yourapp.com"]
  config.notification_email_from = "errors@yourapp.com"

  # Async logging for better performance (if enabled during install)
  config.async_logging = true
  config.async_adapter = :sidekiq  # or :solid_queue, :async

  # Advanced analytics features (if enabled during install)
  config.enable_baseline_alerts = true
  config.enable_similar_errors = true
  config.enable_platform_comparison = true
end

All features can be toggled on/off at any time by editing the initializer.

Environment Variables

# .env
ERROR_DASHBOARD_USER=your_username
ERROR_DASHBOARD_PASSWORD=your_secure_password
SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL=https://hooks.slack.com/services/YOUR/WEBHOOK/URL
DASHBOARD_BASE_URL=https://yourapp.com

📖 Complete configuration guide →

🚀 Usage

Automatic Error Tracking

Rails Error Dashboard automatically tracks errors from:

Controllers (via Rails error reporting)
Background jobs (ActiveJob, Sidekiq)
Rack middleware (catches everything else)

No additional code needed! Just install and it works.

Manual Error Logging

For frontend/mobile apps or custom error logging:

# From your Rails API
RailsErrorDashboard::Commands::LogError.call(
  error_type: "TypeError",
  message: "Cannot read property 'name' of null",
  backtrace: ["App.js:42", "index.js:12"],
  platform: "iOS",
  app_version: "2.1.0",
  user_id: current_user.id,
  context: {
    component: "ProfileScreen",
    device_model: "iPhone 14 Pro"
  }
)

Frontend Integration

// React Native example
try {
  // Your code
} catch (error) {
  fetch('https://yourapp.com/api/errors', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      error_type: error.name,
      message: error.message,
      backtrace: error.stack.split('\n'),
      platform: Platform.OS, // 'ios' or 'android'
      app_version: VERSION
    })
  });
}

📱 Mobile app integration guide →

🔔 Notifications

Set up multi-channel notifications in minutes:

Slack

config.enable_slack_notifications = true
config.slack_webhook_url = ENV['SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL']

Discord

config.enable_discord_notifications = true
config.discord_webhook_url = ENV['DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL']

PagerDuty (Critical Errors Only)

config.enable_pagerduty_notifications = true
config.pagerduty_integration_key = ENV['PAGERDUTY_INTEGRATION_KEY']

Custom Webhooks

config.enable_webhook_notifications = true
config.webhook_urls = ['https://yourapp.com/hooks/errors']

🔕 Notification setup guide →

📚 Documentation

Getting Started

Quickstart Guide - Complete 5-minute setup
Configuration - All configuration options
Mobile App Integration - React Native, Flutter, etc.

Features

Complete Feature List - Every feature explained
Notifications - Multi-channel alerting
Batch Operations - Bulk resolve/delete
Real-Time Updates - Live dashboard
Error Trend Visualizations - Charts & analytics

Advanced

Plugin System - Build custom integrations
API Reference - Complete API documentation
Customization Guide - Customize everything
Database Options - Separate database setup
Database Optimization - Performance tuning

Development

Testing - Multi-version testing
Smoke Tests - Deployment verification tests

📖 View all documentation →

🏗️ Architecture

Built with Service Objects + CQRS Principles:

Commands: LogError, ResolveError, BatchOperations (write operations)
Queries: ErrorsList, DashboardStats, Analytics (read operations)
Value Objects: ErrorContext (immutable data)
Services: PlatformDetector, SimilarityCalculator (business logic)
Plugins: Event-driven extensibility

Clean, maintainable, testable architecture you can understand and modify.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Here's how to get started:

Fork the repository
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
Write tests for your changes
Ensure all tests pass (bundle exec rspec)
Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
Open a Pull Request

Development Setup

git clone https://github.com/AnjanJ/rails_error_dashboard.git
cd rails_error_dashboard

# Automated setup (installs deps, hooks, runs tests)
bin/setup

# Or manual setup
bundle install
bundle exec lefthook install  # Installs git hooks
bundle exec rspec

Git Hooks: We use Lefthook to run quality checks before commit/push. This ensures CI passes and saves GitHub Actions minutes!

🔧 Development guide → | 🧪 Testing guide →

📝 License

Rails Error Dashboard is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

🙏 Acknowledgments

Built with Rails
UI powered by Bootstrap 5
Charts by Chart.js
Pagination by Pagy
Platform detection by Browser gem

💬 Support

📖 Documentation: docs/
🐛 Issues: GitHub Issues
💡 Discussions: GitHub Discussions

Made with ❤️ by Anjan for the Rails community

One Gem to rule them all, One Gem to find them, One Gem to bring them all, and in the dashboard bind them. 🧙‍♂️