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Robin Daugherty edited this page Jul 30, 2017 · 23 revisions

Features

Source code inspection for all stack frames (with highlighting)

When an exception occurs, the Better Errors console is displayed. It shows the stack trace frames that are within the application, if there are any.

The stack trace frames are visible at the left, and the currently-selected frame is inspected on the right.

The lines of source code are shown syntax-highlighted.

an application error shown in Better Errors

Full stack trace

By choosing a different frame on the left, you can inspect the state of the code at each level of execution.

You can switch between seeing only the frames within your application, and seeing all frames including those in external gems or libraries.

backtrace frames outside of application code

Local and instance variable inspection

By scrolling down on the right side, you can see all local variables that exist in the selected frame.

In addition to local variables, session and request variables are listed.

local, request, and session varibles

Live shell (REPL) on every stack frame

You can inspect any variable and call methods available in the chosen frame.

live shell in a stack frame

Links directly to the source line in your editor

At the top of the source code displayed, there is a link directly to the given file, which will open in your editor, even to the specific line.

link directly to the line and file in your editor

Useful information in non-HTML requests

If an exception is raised during a non-HTML request, for example using curl, the exception is returned as text.

text stacktrace in response to curl

text stacktrace in Chrome network inspector

You can then open the manual console to inspect and work with the most recent exception.

the manual console showing the most recent exception