Issue #19197 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze). I think this makes sense and it's pretty trivial. I think you need to add this to a dev meeting ticket so it will be decided whether it's accepted or not. ---------------------------------------- Feature #19197: Add Exception#root_cause https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/19197#change-101808 * Author: AMomchilov (Alexander Momchilov) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal ---------------------------------------- ### Description I would like to add a `#root_cause` method to `Exception`. It returns the last exception in linked-list of causality chain, that is, the original exception (whose own `cause` is `nil`). ### Example ```ruby e = begin raise 'a' # This is the root cause rescue => a begin raise 'b' rescue => b begin raise 'c' # This is the outermost cause assigned to `e` rescue => c c end end end p(e) # => #<RuntimeError: c> p(e.cause) # => #<RuntimeError: b> p(e.cause.cause) # => #<RuntimeError: a> p(e.cause.cause.cause) # => nil p(e.root_cause) # => #<RuntimeError: a> p(e.root_cause.cause) # => nil ``` ### Motivation There are some kinds of exceptions that can occur all over the place (and might be wrapped by arbitrarily many middlemen), but are attributable to a singular global cause. For example, a database outage could raise exceptions in almost every line of business logic of an app that uses ActiveRecord models. Fundamentally, you wouldn't want an error report for every one of these lines. You'd want to look at the root cause, and bucket all SQL-connection issues into a single report, regardless of where they surface. ### Implementation Draft PR: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/6913 -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/