In this guide, we will discuss error handling in Ruby. Error handling is important to know when your application has run into a bug, so that you know how to fix it accordingly.

To see how it works, let's start with creating a line of code that will generate an error:

puts 8/0 

If you execute it, your application will throw an error:

error_handling.rb:1:in `/': divided by 0 (ZeroDivisionError) 
  from error_handling.rb:1:in `<main>' 

This code is attempting to divide by zero (which isn't possible), so it's running into ZeroDivisionError. To handle this error in a more elegant way, the syntax is as follows:

begin 
  puts 8/0 
rescue 
  puts "Rescued the error" 
end 

If you run this code, the program will print out Rescued the error.

Though the error is more elegant, it does not really fix the bug. In fact, this implementation is a poor choice when it comes to managing errors. A better way would be to know what the error is, so you can make the right fix.

I hope this gives you an idea of a basic way to handle errors. In the following sections, we'll walk through the proper techniques for implementing error handling in Ruby programs that follow best practices.