Rollbar allows you to see which versions of your code are throwing exceptions. This is particularly helpful if you are continuously deploying your apps/services because you can see if recent occurrences are coming from the latest deployed version. With the information provided by Rollbar Versions, you can determine whether to proceed with a full deployment after a canary deploy, or if you should roll back to a previous stable version.

By clicking through to view the details of a version, you can see exactly which items were introduced, reactivated, or resolved in each version, as well as a list of the commits that were merged since the previously deployed version.

Enabling Versions

In order to fully utilize Versions, you should do the following:

• Make sure that your Rollbar item occurrences include the code_version property. This is typically a Git SHA for web apps, but you may choose to use a semantic version, datestamp, or other unique indicator. See the documentation for your Rollbar SDK or the Rollbar API docs if you are calling the Rollbar REST API directly.
• Report each deploy of your apps/services, including the same values for environment and revision as in your item occurrences. (NOTE: code_version and revision represent the same thing.). See our Deploy Tracking docs for more details.
• To view the list of commits that were introduced in each new version, set up Source Control Integration with your project's Git repositories.

Code example of code version being added to a Go application

Code snippet of code version being configured in a Go application. Each Rollbar SDK has similar functionality.

// Rollbar configuration of  environment and code version
rollbar.SetToken(config.accessToken)
rollbar.SetEnvironment(config.environment) 
rollbar.SetCodeVersion(config.codeVersion)   

New Version notifications

Rollbar can notify you of newly detected versions via email or Slack.

Email

• Go to Settings → Notifications → Email
• In the Add Rule section, choose New Version → Send Email

Slack

• Go to Settings → Notifications → Slack, select either Email
• In the Add Rule section, choose New Version → Post Message

Non-Git versions (Semantic Versioning, numeric versions, etc.)

Rollbar accepts any string as a value for code_version, but most customers use the SHA value provided by Git when a new commit is made. There are cases when other values are needed, and some considerations are included below.

For any value of code_version used that is not a Git SHA, the code context feature will behave differently. As part of the Git integration for code context, Rollbar will check Git for a revision with the value set in code_version. If that value is not found, the code context will show the "resource not found" error mentioned on the Code Context guide.

In order to get code context to work properly with non-SHA values, make sure the given value is set as a tag in Git. One way to add a tag is when creating a new release.