So, inspired by schwad, I made a thing:

Festive Errors is a Rails gem that spices up the Rails error page with fun holiday themes. We all like to do a little coding around the holidays. Get into the holiday spirit with Festive Errors!

A screenshot of the Rails error page in a web browser that displays an exception that was raise. The error message reads “Happy Halloween!” and there is a ghost emoji in the page heading.

Debugging an exception in the month of October.

It’s a simple Rails engine that hooks into the layout for the error debug page in dev mode. If it’s currently a holiday period, it adds some custom CSS using a content_for hook that Rails provides in the layout.

That’s it! Just add it to your Gemfile.

I tested this on Rails 7.1 and Rails 8, but it doesn’t have tests or CI yet. Themes are also limited both in supported holidays and design (they currently just add an emoji to the page H1).

It will also need some config options eventually for when there are concurrent holidays!

Let’s get festive (errors)