Logging Errors with Trello

A reworded (and arguably better) version of this article has been uploaded on my Medium account. Click here to read the article.

Be honest: debugging a ROBLOX game that is live can be a pain. Most casual players have no idea about anything technical in your game, so when something goes wrong they are going to complain. Most of the time, you will probably tell them something along the lines of "use the Developer Console", but even then they have no access to server-side scripts.

This is where using Trello can be handy. With Trello, you can have your game log errors and send them up to a Trello board, where it will be logged as an individual card.

Sounds exciting? Great. Let's make this thing and get error logging in your project today.

If you visit the Trello homepage, your page probably looks (give or take a few boards) like mine. You should have a nice big button that says Create new board.... Go ahead and click that.

This prompt below should show up. Give it a nice title, make sure to make your board public, and click the Create button to create your new board.

After you have created your board and entered it, it should be blank. Click on the Add a list... button to create a new list. This list will host all of the individual cards that will contain errors that occur in our game. Be sure to give it a title!

Our board is ready. Now, we need to set up permissions. Visit this page to get an API key. It should look something like the picture below. We will refer to the value as your Key. Store it in a safe place.

After that, visit the link below. This activates the key we generated before and gives it permission to read and write to your Trello. Be sure to replace YOUR_KEY with your Key.

https://trello.com/1/authorize?key=YOUR_KEY&name=ROBLOXErrors&expiration=never&response_type=token&scope=read,write

If you did this correctly, the following prompt should show up. Click the Allow button to finish the process.

You should be redirected to a page that has the lines below. Right under the lines should be a long string of characters. This is your Token. Store it in a safe place, and do not share it with anybody (unless you have revoked your token, like I have).

Now go to this GitHub repository and download ROBLOX-Trello-Error-Logging.rbxmx. This is a ROBLOX model that you can insert into your game. The code in the model is also in the repository in case you cannot download the model. Put it in your game like in the picture below.

Be sure to enable HttpService by turning on HttpEnabled. You can do this by running the following line in the Command Bar in Studio. game:GetService("HttpService").HttpEnabled = true

I included a Script named TestCase with a simple error (print(0 + "")) so you can make sure you set it all up correctly.

Clicking on one of the cards should show you the stack trace in the card's description.

Since all of the code is in the repository, you can go ahead and read through it to see how it works if you're interested.

Cheers.