What is best strategy to handle exceptions & errors in Rails?

The fact that you do a lot of manual checking for exceptions suggests that you are just not using them right. In fact, none of your examples is exceptional.

Exceptions are for exceptional circumstances. Bad user input is typically not exceptional; if anything, it's quite common. When you do have an exceptional circumstance, you want to give yourself as much information as possible.

In my experience, the best way to do that is to religiously improve your exception handling based on debugging experience. When you bump into an exception, the very first thing you should do is write a unit test for it. The second thing you should do is determine if there is more information that can be added to the exception.

More information in this case usually takes the form of catching the exception higher up the stack and either handling it or throwing a new, more informative exception that has the benefit of additional context. My personal rule is that I don't like catching exceptions from much more than three levels up the stack. If an exception has to travel any further than that, you need to be catching it earlier.

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