Bugsnag Notification Plugin Creation Guide

Bugsnag.com can notify you when errors happen in your applications. We've created a plugin architecture so you can contribute notification plugins for services you use.

Bugsnag captures errors in real-time from your web, mobile and desktop applications, helping you to understand and resolve them as fast as possible. Create a free account to start capturing exceptions from your applications.

Steps to contributing

• Fork the bugsnag-notification-plugins project on GitHub.

• Create a new folder in /plugins/ for your plugin

• Create the plugin file as index.js or index.coffee, see below for instructions

• Create a config.json file describing the usage and configurable settings for your plugin

• Add a 50x50 icon.png file representing your plugin

• If necessary, add any node module dependencies to the base package.json file

• Make a pull request from your fork to bugsnag/bugsnag-notification-plugins

Writing your plugin

Notification plugins should be written in JavaScript or CoffeeScript and are executed in a queue using our internal node.js application.

Plugins should extend the base NotificationPlugin class defined in notification-plugin.js and override the receiveEvent function to perform the notification. This method is fired when a new event is triggered.

It is easiest to write plugins using CoffeeScript, for example:

NotificationPlugin = require "../../notification-plugin.js"
class MyPlugin extends NotificationPlugin
  @receiveEvent = (config, event) ->
    # Do the hard work here

module.exports = MyPlugin

If you prefer to write your plugin with plain old JavaScript, this is also possible:

var util = require("util");
var NotificationPlugin = require("../../notification-plugin.js")

function MyPlugin() {}
util.inherits(MyPlugin, NotificationPlugin);
MyPlugin.receiveEvent = function (config, event) {
  // Do the hard work here
};

module.exports = MyPlugin;

Testing your plugin

By extending the NotificationPlugin class, you'll be able to test your plugin directly on the command line. In your new plugin directory (plugins/your-plugin) run index.coffee directly:

> coffee index.coffee --option=value --anotherOption=something

Command line options represent the customizable per-project settings as defined in your config.json file.

Note: You should ensure you have run npm install in the top level directory first, to install the dependencies for the project.

Event Format

As well as passing the user's plugin configuration settings, we also pass you an event object, which tells you the reason we triggered a notification.

event: {
    
    // Contains information about the account which has had an event
    account: {
        // The account name
        name: "Account Name",
        
        // The url for the Bugsnag dashboard of the account
        url: "https://bugsnag.com/dashboard/"
    },
    
    // Contains information about the project which has had an event
    project: {
        // The project name
        name: "Project Name",
        
        // The url for the Bugsnag dashboard of the project
        url: "https://bugsnag.com/dashboard/project-name"
    },

    // The reason the user is being notified by the notifier
    trigger: {
        // The identifier for the reason for notification
        type: "firstException",
        
        // The human readable form of the trigger. This can be used to start 
        // a sentence.
        message: "New exception"
    },

    // The error that caused the notification (optional). Will not be present if
    // the project has hit the rate limit.
    error: {
        // The class of exception that caused the error
        exceptionClass: "NullPointerException",
        
        // The message that came with the exception. This may not be present if 
        // the exception didn't generate one.
        message: "Null cannot be dereferenced",
        
        // The context that was active in the application when the error 
        // occurred. This could be which screen
        // the user was using at the time, for example.
        context: "BugsnagMainActivity",
        
        // The application version
        appVersion: "1.2.3",
        
        // The release stage, will most often be production, or development.
        releaseStage: "production",
        
        // The number of times this exception has occurred (including this one)
        occurrences: 1,
        
        // When was the error first received. Will be a Date object.
        firstReceived: new Date(),
        
        // How many users have been affected. Could be 0 if there was no user 
        // associated with the error.
        usersAffected: 1,
        
        // The URL on bugsnag.com with the full details about this error
        url: "https://bugsnag.com/errors/example",
        
        // The stack trace for this error. An array of stack frames.
        stacktrace: [{
            // The file that this stack frame was in.
            file: "BugsnagMainActivity.java",
            
            // The line number of the stack frame, within the file.
            lineNumber: 123,
            
            // The method that was being executed.
            method: "onCreate",
            
            // Indicates that this stack fram was within the project. If the key
            //is not present, it is assumed to be false.
            inProject: true
        }
        ...
        ]
    }
}

HTTP request helper

Since most notification plugins will use http for communication to external services, we've provided a request helper function. This function provides a superagent request object, which you can read about here. Some examples:

// Perform a HTTP GET request
@request
  .get("http://someurl.com")
  .send(params)
  .end()


// Perform a normal HTTP POST request
@request
  .post("http://someurl.com")
  .send(params)
  .type("form")
  .end()


// Perform a HTTP POST request with a JSON body
@request
  .post("http://someurl.com")
  .send(params)
  .end()

config.json format

Your plugin's config.json file describes to users how to use and configure your plugin from their Bugsnag dashboard. The file must be a valid JSON file and look similar to the following example:

{
    // The name of the plugin.
    "name": "HipChat",
    
    // A description of the action that will be performed.
    "actions": {
      "create": "Post to a HipChat chatroom",
    },
    
    // We trigger notifications when certain events occur in bugsnag (see the 
    // Event Format documentation above). To signal which triggers your plugin
    // understands, set this to an array of trigger strings. 
    // eg. ["exception", "firstException"]. 
    "supportedTriggers": ["firstException"],

    // The type of plugin ("issueTracker", "communication", or "other")
    "type": "communication",

    // An array of fields to present to the user on the Bugsnag.com dashboard.
    "fields": [{
        // The name of the field. This is how you will reference the field in 
        // the configuration options that are passed to your notifier when it is
        // run. Should be camelCase.
        "name": "authToken",
        
        // The label to display to the user for this field
        "label": "Auth Token",
        
        // A full description or hint for this field.
        "description": "Your HipChat API auth token",
        
        // The data type of this field, either string, select, password or boolean 
        // (optional, defaults to string)
        "type": "boolean",
        
        // An array of selectable values to present in the dropdown list
        // (required when type == "select").
        "allowedValues": ["yellow", "red", "green", "purple", "random"],
        
        // A default value for this field (optional).
        "defaultValue": "yellow"

        // A link to documentation for this field - or a method of obtaining the value (optional)
        // Can also contain other fields by using {fieldName} in the URL. In the following example
        // applicationKey is another configuration option that is required for this URL.
        "link": "https://trello.com/1/authorize?key={applicationKey}&name=Bugsnag"
    }
    ...
    ]
}

Reporting Bugs or Feature Requests

Please report any bugs or feature requests on the github issues page for this project here:

https://github.com/bugsnag/bugsnag-notification-plugins/issues