Go

Installing Airbrake in a Go application

Introduction

Gobrake is the official notifier library for Airbrake for the Go programming language. Gobrake provides a minimalist API that enables the ability to send any Go error or panic to the Airbrake dashboard. The library is extremely lightweight, with minimal overhead.

Key features

  • Simple, consistent and easy-to-use library API
  • Asynchronous exception reporting
  • Flexible configuration options
  • Support for environments
  • Add extra context to errors before reporting them
  • Filters support (filter out sensitive or unwanted data that shouldn’t be sent)
  • Ignore errors based on class, message, status, file, or any other filter
  • SSL support (all communication with Airbrake is encrypted by default)
  • Notify Airbrake on panics
  • Set error severity to control notification thresholds
  • Support for code hunks (lines of code surrounding each backtrace frame)
  • Automatic deploy tracking
  • Performance monitoring features such as HTTP route statistics, SQL queries, and Job execution statistics
  • Integrations with Beego, Gin and Negroni
  • Last but not least, we follow semantic versioning 2.0.0
  • Send errors from glog to Airbrake

Installation

Go modules

Gobrake can be installed like any other Go package that supports Go modules.

Installing in an existing project

Just go get the library:

go get github.com/airbrake/gobrake/v5

Installing in a new project

Create a new directory, initialize a new module and go get the library:

mkdir airbrake_example && cd airbrake_example
go mod init airbrake_example
go get github.com/airbrake/gobrake/v5

Example

This is the minimal example that you can use to test Gobrake with your project.

package main

import (
  "errors"

  "github.com/airbrake/gobrake/v5"
)

var airbrake = gobrake.NewNotifierWithOptions(&gobrake.NotifierOptions{
  ProjectId: <YOUR PROJECT ID>,
  ProjectKey: "<YOUR API KEY>",
  Environment: "production",
})

func main() {
  defer airbrake.Close()
  defer airbrake.NotifyOnPanic()

  airbrake.Notify(errors.New("operation failed"), nil)
}

To find <YOUR PROJECT ID> and <YOUR API KEY> navigate to your project’s Settings and copy the values from the right sidebar.

That’s it! The airbrake.NotifyOnPanic() call will handle automatic panic reporting.

Verify Airbrake is working as expected

You can use airbrake.Notify() to send handled errors. Let’s use it now to check if gobrake is installed correctly:

import "errors"

func testAirbrake() {
  airbrake.Notify(errors.New("Error Test from Airbrake"), nil)
}

You should see your dashboard updating with your test error soon after you run that function.

Full documentation

Check out our official GitHub repo for info on advanced features like ignoring errors, setting error severity and more.