Lars Pind

internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship

Lars Pind - internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship
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RELEASE: ExceptionTextable Rails plugin

July 13, 2006 · 4 comments

I’ve released a plugin, out of my latest project, that will notify you by SMS when there are errors on your server. It is the same idea as Jamis Buck’s excellent Exception Notifier plugin, but specially designed for SMS in the following ways:

  • Messages are much shorter, making them more suitable for cell phones
  • Messages are throttled so you don’t get too many
  • It can be extended with alternative gateways

You can use it with both US-style email gateways, as well is Clickatell, a for-money gateway that can send to European-based cell phones. If you write other gateways, or have changes to the email one, which I haven’t actually tested in real use.

To install simply say:

script/plugin source http://svn.pinds.com/rails/plugins
script/plugin install exception_textable

See the README for more details.

Enjoy!

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4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Drazen Dotlic // Aug 02, 2006 at 09:58 AM

    Great stuff! I just finished reading Rails Recipes and noticed how exception_notifiable did not include other ways to inform a developer about a "crash" in the production environment. I thought - why not add SMS support? Google search yielded this page first - very nice! I think the best route would be to try to persuade the Rails guys to include this into the exception_notifiable plugin, so that the basic mechanism stays the same while the delivery backend can vary.

  • 2 Your app looks great!! // Oct 13, 2006 at 11:10 PM

    But I could not get it working with my tmobile number. I am running it on my local host. Should that be a problem?

  • 3 Lars Pind // Oct 13, 2006 at 11:27 PM

    Not that I'm aware of. Have you tried sending an email directly to your phone if you're in the US? Or are you using clickatell? They have an email gateway as well, so you can test that way.

  • 4 rick // Oct 03, 2007 at 04:39 PM

    Interesting... Perhaps it's finally time to merge the various exception notification plugins. I keep my errors in the db and read them with rss, for example...