devalerts 0.2.0

Send unhandled Python exceptions straight to a Telegram chat. No backend, no account, no database — just your own bot token.

devalerts

Русская версия

Send unhandled Python exceptions straight to a Telegram chat — the moment they happen, on your phone. No backend, no account, no database — just your own bot token.

import devalerts

devalerts.init(bot_token="123456:ABC-DEF...", chat_id=123456789)

That's the whole setup. Two minutes with @BotFather and every unhandled crash — including ones raised in threads — lands in your chat instead of a log file nobody's watching.

Why devalerts

• Zero infrastructure. No SaaS signup, no ingestion server, no API key to manage beyond your own Telegram bot token. State lives in a local SQLite file you already own.
• One line to install, one line to wire up. init() installs the hook and gets out of the way.
• Not spam. Errors are grouped by fingerprint and rate-limited per group, so a crash loop sends one message, not a thousand.
• Framework-aware. Ships an ASGI middleware for FastAPI/Starlette apps, where the default excepthook would never even see a request error.
• Small and typed. No dependencies, ships py.typed, ~450 lines total — short enough to read in one sitting before you trust it with your errors.

Install

uv add devalerts

(or pip install devalerts if you're not using uv)

Usage

1. Create a bot with @BotFather and get its token.

2. Message your bot once (or add it to a group) so it's allowed to message you back.

3. Get your chat id — message @userinfobot, or call https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/getUpdates after step 2 and read message.chat.id.

4. Verify it's wired up correctly before touching any code:

   uv run devalerts test --bot-token 123456:ABC-DEF... --chat-id 123456789
   

5. In your app, as early as possible:

import devalerts

devalerts.init(bot_token="123456:ABC-DEF...", chat_id=123456789)

That's it — any unhandled exception (including ones raised in threads) now also lands in your Telegram chat.

Grouping, rate limiting, and the dashboard

Exceptions are grouped by fingerprint (exception type + file + line where it was raised) in a local SQLite file (~/.devalerts/state.db). Each group sends at most one Telegram message per rate_limit_seconds (default 300); repeats inside that window are counted but not sent, and the next message for that group says how many were skipped. Old groups (untouched for 7 days) are pruned automatically. Configure the window via init():

devalerts.init(bot_token="...", chat_id=123456789, rate_limit_seconds=60)

See what's grouped and what's currently rate-limited:

uv run devalerts dashboard

Pass --json for machine-readable output. Silence a noisy group without touching code — the ID column accepts any unique prefix:

uv run devalerts mute abc12345
uv run devalerts unmute abc12345
uv run devalerts clear abc12345   # or: devalerts clear --all

Unmuting resends the next occurrence with the accumulated skip count, same as a rate-limit window expiring.

Error groups that keep piling up while suppressed are chronic: each such resend doubles the effective rate_limit_seconds for that group (capped at 8x), so a crash loop backs itself off instead of paging you every window forever. A group that goes quiet and reappears once resets to the base rate immediately. The dashboard shows the active multiplier (● sending ×4).

Context: hostname and tags

Every alert automatically includes the sending host, so you can tell which process/server it came from when one bot serves several:

devalerts.init(bot_token="...", chat_id=123456789, tags={"env": "production"})

🔴 ValueError: boom
🖥️ prod-web-2 (env=production)

Add ad-hoc tags to a single call — they override init()'s tags on a key collision:

devalerts.report(extra={"request_id": "abc123"})

@devalerts.capture(extra={"job": "nightly-sync"})
def run_job(): ...

Manually reporting a caught exception

try:
    risky_call()
except Exception:
    devalerts.report()  # sends the currently-handled exception

or:

with devalerts.capture():
    risky_call()  # reports on exception, then re-raises

capture also works as a decorator, so you don't need to touch a function's body at all:

@devalerts.capture()
def risky_call():
    ...

FastAPI / Starlette / any ASGI app

init()'s excepthook won't see request errors — the framework already catches them internally to return a 500 response, so nothing "unhandled" ever reaches the process. Use the ASGI middleware instead:

app.add_middleware(devalerts.ASGIMiddleware)

Only exceptions that actually escape as server errors get reported — routing 404s and raised HTTPExceptions are already turned into responses by the framework before the middleware sees them.

Celery

Same problem as ASGI apps: init()'s excepthook never sees exceptions raised inside a task, because Celery catches them itself to record the task's FAILURE state. Call init_celery() in addition to init():

devalerts.init(bot_token="...", chat_id=123456789)
devalerts.init_celery()

This connects to Celery's task_failure signal (fired once a task has genuinely failed — retries exhausted or none configured, so retried tasks don't spam an alert per attempt) and reports through the same grouping/rate-limiting/redaction path as everything else, tagged with the task name and id automatically. Requires Celery to already be installed in the worker process — it's imported lazily, not a devalerts dependency.

Why not Sentry?

If you already run Sentry/Rollbar/etc., keep using it — devalerts isn't a replacement. It's for the side project, internal tool, or small service that doesn't have (and doesn't want) that infrastructure: no account to create, no SDK to configure, no server to trust — just a bot token you already control.

	devalerts	Sentry-style tracker
Setup	one bot token	account + project + SDK config
Backend	none — Telegram only	hosted or self-hosted service
Where alerts land	your Telegram chat	a web dashboard
Grouping / rate limiting	yes, local SQLite	yes, server-side
Search, trends, releases	no	yes

FAQ

Works with FastAPI / Starlette? Yes — use ASGIMiddleware, since the default excepthook never sees request errors.

Works with Docker? Yes, nothing container-specific. Just make sure ~/.devalerts/ (the dedup state file) is either writable inside the container or a mounted volume if you want dedup state to survive restarts — it self-recreates otherwise.

Works with threads? Yes — init() installs both sys.excepthook and threading.excepthook.

Works with Celery / background workers? Yes — call init_celery() in addition to init() to catch exceptions raised inside tasks, which the excepthook alone won't see.

Works on Windows / Linux / macOS? Yes — stdlib only (urllib, sqlite3, threading), no OS-specific code paths.

Privacy & Security

• The only network call devalerts makes is to api.telegram.org — no telemetry, no analytics, nothing else phones home.
• No third-party server and no devalerts-run backend — messages go straight from your process to your own Telegram bot.
• No accounts, no signup, no API key beyond the bot token you create and control yourself.
• Basic secret redaction only (a few common token/key patterns) — do not rely on this for sensitive production data; scrub what you can before it ever reaches an exception message.
• If Telegram delivery fails after retrying, the alert (already redacted, if redact=True) is appended to ~/.devalerts/failed.log instead of being dropped — clean it up like any other local log file.

What this does NOT do (by design)

• Grouping/rate limiting is local and in-process only (SQLite file, no server) — the dashboard is a CLI table, not a web UI.
• No backend, no accounts — each user runs their own bot.

Roadmap

• Web dashboard (hosted, optional — the local CLI dashboard stays either way)
• Slack delivery
• Discord delivery
• Email delivery

Development

uv sync --group dev
uv run pre-commit install

pre-commit runs ruff check, ruff format, and mypy before each commit. Run the full check manually with:

uv run pytest
uv run pre-commit run --all-files

License

MIT — see LICENSE.