December 1

Rails 2.2 Custom Error Pages With Exception Loggable

Well, with the release of Rails 2.2 and the ability to create custom error pages I figured I’d revisit my 404/500 pages and try to do it the new way.

Setting up the rescue_from methods were simple enough, but I noticed that when I was capturing my error 500s it wasn’t logging the exception. Here is a quick way to have it both display your custom 500 page and log the exception for later review:

  # application.rb
  include ExceptionLoggable

  unless ActionController::Base.consider_all_requests_local
    # yeah, its a long line
    rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, ActionController::RoutingError, ActionController::UnknownController, ActionController::UnknownAction, :with => :render_404
    rescue_from RuntimeError, :with => :render_500
  end

private

  def render_404
    render :template => "shared/error_404", :layout => 'application', :status => :not_found
  end

  def render_500
    # hacky, but works, this logs the exception in ExceptionLoggable
    log_exception $!
    render :template => "shared/error_500", :layout => 'application', :status => :internal_server_error
  end

To test this just change config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = true to config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = false in your config/environments/development.rb file.

Not the _best_ way or cleanest, but it gets the job done without too much trouble.