Flask integration guide

Typical installation time: 5 minutes

Hi there! You’ve found Honeybadger’s guide to Flask error tracking and performance monitoring. Once installed, Honeybadger will automatically report errors and performance insights from your Flask application.

Installing the package

Install the honeybadger Python package with pip (or add it to your requirements.txt):

pip install honeybadger

Flask also requires the blinker library for automatic error reporting:

pip install blinker

In your Flask application, initialize the Honeybadger extension:

from flask import Flask
from honeybadger.contrib import FlaskHoneybadger

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['HONEYBADGER_ENVIRONMENT'] = 'production'
app.config['HONEYBADGER_API_KEY'] = 'PROJECT_API_KEY'
app.config['HONEYBADGER_INSIGHTS_ENABLED'] = True
FlaskHoneybadger(app, report_exceptions=True, reset_context_after_request=True)

Tip

FlaskHoneybadger checks Flask’s configuration object and automatically configures Honeybadger using 12-factor style config options. You can also configure Honeybadger with environment variables:

export HONEYBADGER_ENVIRONMENT="production"
export HONEYBADGER_API_KEY="PROJECT_API_KEY"
export HONEYBADGER_INSIGHTS_ENABLED=True

If you use this method, you can omit the app.config settings. Environment variables take precedence over Flask configuration settings when both are present.

See the Configuration reference for additional info.

Testing your installation

Note

Honeybadger does not report errors in development and test environments by default. To enable reporting in development environments, temporarily add app.config['HONEYBADGER_FORCE_REPORT_DATA'] = True to your Flask config.

To test that Honeybadger is working, you can create a simple test exception:

from honeybadger import honeybadger

try:
    raise Exception("Honeybadger test exception")
except Exception as e:
    honeybadger.notify(e)

If the installation is working correctly, this error should appear in your Honeybadger dashboard.

How it works

The FlaskHoneybadger extension uses Flask’s signals (via Blinker) to detect and report exceptions. When an exception occurs, it automatically adds the following information to the error report:

• URL: The URL the request was sent to
• Component: The module that the view is defined in (or class name for class-based views)
• Action: The name of the function called (prefixed with blueprint name if applicable)
• Params: Query parameters and form data (filtered for sensitive data)
• Session: Session data
• CGI data: Request headers and method (filtered for sensitive data)

Component naming conventions

The following conventions are used for component names:

• View functions: <module name>#<view name>
• Class-based views: <module name>#<class name>
• Blueprints: <module name>#<blueprint name>.<view name>

Additional configuration options

When initializing FlaskHoneybadger, you can pass additional options:

Name	Type	Default	Description
report_exceptions	bool	False	Automatically report exceptions raised in views (including those from abort())
reset_context_after_request	bool	False	Reset Honeybadger context after each request

Sending logs from your infrastructure

Honeybadger isn’t just for errors and application data! You can use our syslog, Vector, or PaaS integrations to send additional data from your infrastructure to Honeybadger Insights, where you can query, visualize, and analyze all of your production data in one place.