Airbrake / errbit error reporting not working with puma 6 / rails 7

(Note issue below has been resolve, see link below for best resolution)

Last few weeks I busy updating several of my Ruby on Rails apps to Ruby 3.2.0 and Rails 7.0. (running Puma 6)
Because upgrading an app requires me to monitor the apps, and get notified when something happens, it's crucial that my error notification tool works.
I use airbrake with errbit as backend.

Most apps report perfectly after upgrade. But I notice one of my Apps didn't report any errors.

This app used the preload! functionality of puma.
With the preload option:

  • rake airbrake:test just works.
  • Exception from sidekiq Jobs are reported,
  • but controller exceptions aren't working

Removing the preload! of puma solve the issue.


But this isn't always possible, in one of my apps, I use the embedded puma variant. In this article Mike describes the steps how to do this.

This method requires a preload. (so removing it isn' a good solution)

After a lot of debugging/testing I found a simple workaround to solves the non-reporting issue. Forcing a syncronized notify instead of the default async.
I noticed the async config option was removed from airbrake, so I don't know how to disable it. For now I use the flexibility of Ruby to change the default notify implementation to the synchronized variant.

## force to airbrake to be NOT async, to solve issues with preload! puma
def Airbrake.notify(...)
  Airbrake.notify_sync(...)
end

With this included in my airbrake initializer the errors are noticed again :-)

NOTE
I've created a PR for ruby/timeout to fix this issue https://github.com/ruby/timeout/pull/25

Which has been merged in the v0.3.2 release of the Timeout gem. 🎉
https://github.com/ruby/timeout/releases/tag/v0.3.2

Rails mysql structure.sql dump contains AUTO_INCREMENT

When rails generates a structure.sql dump for MySQL it contains the AUTO_INCREMENT value. Which is anoying because this is not something you want to happen.

CREATE TABLE `active_storage_variant_records` (
  `id` bigint NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `blob_id` bigint NOT NULL,
  `variation_digest` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  UNIQUE KEY `index_active_storage_variant_records_uniqueness` (`blob_id`,`variation_digest`),
  CONSTRAINT `fk_rails_993965df05` FOREIGN KEY (`blob_id`) REFERENCES `active_storage_blobs` (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=471 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci;

Look at the part: AUTO_INCREMENT=471

After digging through the activerecord code, I saw I could sneak in a mysqldump option for the dump call. Yeah! 👍🏻

But there isn't such option 😕. It's an ancient BUG/Feature of mysql, which of course still isn't resolved in MySQL 8. https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=20786

Why would you like to dump the table structure (without data) with the AUTO_INCREMENT value!?

As a workaround it's possible to enhance the db:schema:dump task in a custom rake file (lib/tasks/remove_autoincrement_from_dump.rake).
So the AUTO_INCREMENT part is removed from it.

Rake::Task['db:schema:dump'].enhance do
  structure_sql_path = Rails.root.join("db/structure.sql")
  if File.exist?(structure_sql_path)
    sql = File.read(structure_sql_path)
    File.write(structure_sql_path, sql.gsub(/AUTO_INCREMENT=[0-9]+/, ""))
  end
end

References:

Rails generate both structure.sql and schema.rb

Default behaviour for rails is to generate a db/schema.rb when running migrations or dumping the database.

Schema.rb is great because it can be used for populating other database types and is used to populate the test database.
And I personally think it's great becaus of the vscode plugin Rails Schema which shows the database structure of your application in a sidebar (TIP, move this bar to the right panel).

The rake task db:migrate default behaviour is to invoke a db:schema:dump when migrating is done. By default this generates the schema.rb file.
This output of the generated file is used to popuplate the test-database..

But somethimes the db/schema.rb isn't good enough for popuplating the test database or using the file to generate the basic structure. Contraints are quirky.
(For example see previous article mysql json constraints).
To generate a native sql dump of the database structure, you can change the default structure to sql. Place the following line in your config/application.rb.

    config.active_record.schema_format = :sql

When enabling this dumps are generated to db/structure.sql.
But you loose the schema.rb dumps.

Here's a tip to work with structure.sql and just generate the schema.rb (for your lovely sidebar).

Create a file in lib/tasks/schema_dump.rb and enhance the dump task, so it also creates the schema.rb file.

Rake::Task['db:schema:dump'].enhance do
  File.open(Rails.root.join('db/schema.rb'), 'w') do |stream|
    ActiveRecord::SchemaDumper.dump(ActiveRecord::Base.connection, stream)
  end
end

NOTE: structure.sql contains yet another MySQL bug. (See next article for workaround)
Tip: use postgresql !

Rails incorrect constraints in schema.rb mysql dumps (for json)

The default dumping strategy for rails is to generate a ruby schema.rb file.
Having a table created by the following migration. (simplified version)

class CreateOrganisation < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
  def change
    create_table :organisations do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.json :settings
    end
  end
end

It generates the following dump

ActiveRecord::Schema[7.0].define(version: 2022_12_29_082458) do
  create_table "organisations", charset: "utf8mb4", collation: "utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci", force: :cascade do |t|
    t.string "name"
    t.text "settings", size: :long, collation: "utf8mb4_bin"
    t.check_constraint "son_valid(`settings`", name: "organisations_chk_1"
  end

Trying to use this dump results in an error. Which isn't strange when you look at the generated constraint code. The MySQL adapter doesn't extract the constraints correctly

    t.check_constraint "son_valid(`settings`", name: "organisations_chk_1"

TIP: Don't use the 'json' datatype when MySQL. Event better use Postgres when possible, with it's jsonb column.

(See the next post for a good workaround to use structure.sql and schema.rb)