New in Yeller: Sourcemap Support

This is a blog about the development of Yeller, The Exception Tracker with Answers

Read more about Yeller here

“Our production JavaScript errors are waaay too noisy”

“I can’t fix our JS errors, because our JS is minified”

“Oh, you use ClojureScript? Abandon all hope of production debugging, ye who enter here”

For years, fixing production errors from minified or compiled JavaScript code has been very difficult, leading to many folk just giving up on their JavaScript errors. Minified JS (which you have to do to get the load time of your page down) means that line numbers change on every deploy, and all the code is on one line anyway, so you have no idea what the cause of your error actually is. Compiled to JavaScript languages (like ClojureScript) get it even worse - they get stacktraces that don’t resemble the original source in any way whatsoever.

This minification and shrinking also means that deduplicating errors gets really difficult, so you end up with hundreds of thousands of errors, with no idea which ones actually matter.

But it doesn’t have to be this bad! Modern browser vendors have been hard at work fixing this problem, and came up with Source Maps - a way to turn a stacktrace from minified (or otherwise compiled) JavaScript back into the original source. Most minifiers and compilers let you emit sourcemaps, and if you put them in the right place, things like Chrome’s Dev Tools will pick up on them and demunge the stacktrace for you.

So, today Yeller is shipping sourcemap support. No more noise from your browser JS errors, and a much better debugging experience for compile to JS languages.

Get Started with Better JavaScript errors now.

If your minifier or compiler supports them, all you have to do is host your sourcemap file at the same place your source code is, and Yeller takes care of everything else. If you’re already hosting sourcemaps, you don’t even need to make any changes - Yeller will pick them up automatically.

Yeller’s sourcemap support directly uses the parsing code from the world class Google Closure compiler, which powers ClojureScript, and a huge set of JavaScript from Google’s suite of apps. It’s been rock solid, and running in beta for weeks, providing a much better experience for folk with JavaScript errors.

References

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Yeller works with Clojure, Ruby, Rails, Java, JavaScript, Go, Haskell and Node.js