Lapis exception tracker

This module makes the error handler in Lapis save the errors to database. Optionally you can make it email you the exceptions.

Are you updating from before 2.0?

You may need to run migrations. Add a new migration to your app and call run_migrations. It's safe to call it multiple times with no side effects so you're free to add that migration every time you update.

  [XXX] = require("lapis.exceptions.schema").run_migrations

Installing

$ luarocks install lapis-exceptions

Create a new migration that look like this. This will create the necessary tables for storing errors, and make any updates to the scchema if necessary. If you are updating the library, you may need to run migrations again. See the upgrade details in the release notes.

-- migrations.moon/lua
{
  ...

  [1439944992]: require("lapis.exceptions.schema").run_migrations
}

Enable it in your top level app by calling @enable. This will wrap your app's handle_error method with a new function that can record errors, and then call the previous function.

class App extends lapis.Application
  @enable "exception_tracking"

  -- ...

Lastly, add to track_exceptions true to each environment you want the exception tracking to happen, along with any other optional configuration. This will cause the error handler to stard recording errors into the database.

-- config.moon
config = require "lapis.config"

config "production", ->
  track_exceptions true

  -- app_name "My app" --> optional, gives title to emails
  -- admin_email "me@example.com" --> optional, sends email to you
  -- ...

Emails

Lapis doesn't have a standardized email sending interface yet, in order for mail to work you need to provide your own send_mail function.

The exception mailer will look for a module called helpers.email and it should contain a function called send_email that takes as arguments the recipient email address, the subject, and the body.

-- this should work to be able to send exception emails:
require("helpers.email").send_email "leafo@example.com", "Hello!", "This is an email"

You can find an example send_mail implementation in the MoonRocks repository.

An email will be sent to config.admin_email every time a new exception type is created, or every time an exception type is updated if it's been 10 minutes since the last update.

Protected calls

Two functions are provided for running code with error capturing. Any errors that happen will be captured and written to the exception request table. The error will not propagate outside the call. It works similar to Lua's pcall.

import protected_call from require "lapis.exceptions"

success, ret = protected_call ->
  hello = 3 + "what"

If you're running in a Lapis request context, you can pass a request object as the first argument to record any information about that request:

lapis = require "lapis"
import protected_call from require "lapis.exceptions"

class App extends lapis.Application
  "/": =>
    success, ret = protected_call @, ->
      error "something failed"

    "ok"

CLI

A lapis exceptions command is provided for managing exceptions from the terminal. It must be run from a Lapis project directory with a valid configuration.

# List recent exception groups (default command)
$ lapis exceptions

# List with filters
$ lapis exceptions list --status resolved --sort count --since '7 days'

# Search exceptions by message or request path
$ lapis exceptions list --search "timeout" --search-path "/api/"

# Show details for a specific exception group
$ lapis exceptions show 42

# List individual requests for a group
$ lapis exceptions requests 42 --show-trace

# Update status of exception groups
$ lapis exceptions update 42 43 --status ignored

# Delete exception groups
$ lapis exceptions delete 42 43

# Create an exception manually
$ lapis exceptions create "something went wrong" --path "/test" --method POST

All list commands support --json for machine-readable output, and --page / --limit for pagination.

MCP Server

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server is available for integrating exception management with AI tools like Claude. Start it over stdio with:

$ lapis mcp lapis.exceptions.mcp_server

To add it to your MCP client configuration (e.g. Claude Desktop or Claude Code):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lapis-exceptions": {
      "command": "lapis",
      "args": ["mcp", "lapis.exceptions.mcp_server"],
      "cwd": "/path/to/your/lapis/project"
    }
  }
}

The server provides the following tools:

• list_exception_groups -- list and filter exception groups
• list_exceptions -- list individual exception requests
• show_exception_group -- show group details with recent exceptions
• create_exception -- create a new exception
• update_exception_group -- update group status
• delete_exception_group -- delete a group and its exceptions

Models

Two models are created to hold exception data: ExceptionTypes and ExceptionRequests. ExceptionTypes holds normalized exception messages. ExceptionRequests holds the original exception message along with data about the request. It has a foreign key pointing to the exception type it belongs to.

The models can be accessed like so:

import ExceptionTypes, ExceptionRequests from require "lapis.exceptions.models"

Exception grouping

Exceptions are grouped by their exception message in order to reduce the amount of top level issues created. A normalized exception message is stored in the ExceptionTypes table. Numbers and strings are replaced by generic identifiers, line numbers are left alone.

For example, the following exception message:

./lapis/nginx/postgres.lua:51: header part is incomplete: select id from hello_world where name = 'yeah' and age > 10

Would be normalized to:

./lapis/nginx/postgres.lua:51: header part is incomplete: select id from hello_world where name = [STRING] and age > [NUMBER]

Before being stored in the database.

Changelog

https://github.com/leafo/lapis-exceptions/releases

Contact

Author: Leaf Corcoran (leafo) (@moonscript) Email: leafot@gmail.com Homepage: http://leafo.net License: MIT