I would like to limit the size of the stack traces I am seeing in Rails. I'm not really interested in debugging the Rails stack as much as my own application. Is there any built-in way to have Rails do this dynamically?
Yes. Take a look at the ActiveSupport::BacktraceCleaner class. Nice explanation here.
You could wrap the code with your own exception catcher and just output how much you want.
Using the array from the backtrace-Method
Only alternative I could think of. Recompiling Ruby and changing the values which control the stack depth in eval.c (TRACE_HEAD and TRACE_TAIL)