Merge pull request #78 from DavidAntaramian/documentation-fix-for-environment

Add more documentation about environment configuration

Author: mitchellhenke

lib/sentry.ex

@@ -6,28 +6,60 @@ defmodule Sentry do
 
 
   @moduledoc """
-    Provides the basic functionality to submit a `Sentry.Event` to the Sentry Service.
+  Provides the basic functionality to submit a `Sentry.Event` to the Sentry Service.
 
-    ### Configuration
+  ## Configuration
 
-    Add the following to your production config
-        config :sentry, dsn: "https://public:[email protected]/1"
-          included_environments: [:prod],
-          environment_name: :prod,
-          tags: %{
-            env: "production"
-          }
+  Add the following to your production config
 
-    ### Capturing Exceptions
+      config :sentry, dsn: "https://public:[email protected]/1"
+        included_environments: [:prod],
+        environment_name: :prod,
+        tags: %{
+          env: "production"
+        }
 
-    Simply calling `capture_exception\2` will send the event.
+  The `environment_name` and `included_environments` work together to determine
+  if and when Sentry should record exceptions. The `environment_name` is the
+  name of the current environment. In the example above, we have explicitly set
+  the environment to `:prod` which works well if you are inside an environment
+  specific configuration `config/prod.exs`.
 
-        Sentry.capture_exception(my_exception)
+  An alternative is to use `Mix.env` in your general configuration file:
 
-    ### Configuring The `Logger` Backend
 
-    See `Sentry.Logger`
+      config :sentry, dsn: "https://public:[email protected]/1"
+        included_environments: [:prod],
+        environment_name: Mix.env
 
+  This will set the environment name to whatever the current Mix environment
+  atom is, but it will only send events if the current environment is `:prod`,
+  since that is the only entry in the `included_environments` key.
+
+  You can even rely on more custom determinations of the environment name. It's
+  not uncommmon for most applications to have a "staging" environment. In order
+  to handle this without adding an additional Mix environment, you can set an
+  environment variable that determines the release level.
+
+      config :sentry, dsn: "https://public:[email protected]/1"
+        included_environments: ~w(production staging),
+        environment_name: System.get_env("RELEASE_LEVEL") || "development"
+
+  In this example, we are getting the environment name from the `RELEASE_LEVEL`
+  environment variable. If that variable does not exist, we default to `"development"`.
+  Now, on our servers, we can set the environment variable appropriately. On
+  our local development machines, exceptions will never be sent, because the
+  default value is not in the list of `include_environments`.
+
+  ## Capturing Exceptions
+
+  Simply calling `capture_exception\2` will send the event.
+
+      Sentry.capture_exception(my_exception)
+
+  ## Configuring The `Logger` Backend
+
+  See `Sentry.Logger`
   """
 
   @client Application.get_env(:sentry, :client, Sentry.Client)