We're happy to announce that the latest npm package for error tracking of your front-end with AppSignal has just been released. 🚀

For those of you who aren't really familiar with our error tracking service, we suggest you to take a deeper look into our docs.

This was one of the bigger releases, and it includes many improvements and bug fixes. Here's what we've done:

Passing an Undefined Key in Development Logs Errors To the Console

While you're working on your app locally, you can now add AppSignal to your front-end app without sending calls to AppSignal. This makes it useful for development since you don't have to check AppSignal while debugging errors, but you can rely on the console itself.

All you need to do is to pass an undefined key to the constructor, which will switch into development mode, and the client will output the span to the console and rethrow the error.

Added Support for Running Inside Node.js and Using Only the Error Tracking Part of AppSignal

We've added support for Node.js and removed the implicit dependency of the window object.

This means that the integration works in any JS environment regardless of the availability of the DOM or the window object. This enables those writing serverless functions for things like AWS Lambda to use an unpolished form of the error tracking portion of our service. Right now, the app will assume that the errors come from your front-end, so it will add geolocation for the IP address that sends the error, and it will put everything in the ‘front-end’ namespace. Let us know if you want to use this setup, and when enough people do, we will bump up the polishing in our planning.

Ignoring URLs With Option in plugin-breadcrumbs-network

The 1.1.0 of @appsignal/plugin-breadcrumbs-network has the ability to ignore URLs with an option array of regexps.

If any of the URLs passed as ignoreUrls match the URL of the current request, no breadcrumb is added for it.

Example:

appsignal.use(
  plugin({
    ignoreUrls: [/api\.github\.com/],
  })
);

This comes in handy when you're trying to omit requests going outside your own domain, from e.g. analytics scripts since these provide no value for you and just clutter the saved error report.

Updated Dependencies

As a regular housekeeping task, we always update all of our dependencies, so that you don't face any potential issues while monitoring your app with AppSignal.

Your Feedback Triggered These Improvements

You mean the hello world to us at AppSignal. In fact, all of the changes we’ve talked about today were triggered by the feedback we received from you. So, please feel free to send us your comments at any time, we’re always there to listen, learn, and improve. Real humans are on the other end listening and replying.