Better error logging with with error wrapping

This December, why not give the gift of better error logging?

For a while I have thought that the functionality provided by the stdlib errors package in the standard library was insufficient. One issue with errors is that they lack the context, namely stack information, that say, an exception would provide in another language. With the stdlib package, you can see the line number where an error is logged but you cannot see where the error was generated which is usually more important. This is because good error handling practice is to log the error at its highest level of propagation, but it is here where it is most far removed from the site of the error generation. You do get the string that is set when the error is generated but these can often be dynamically generated or reused in multiple places so they are no replacement for a stack trace.

This problem can be resolved by use of the third party pkg/errors package github.com/pkg/errors. This package was designed to be used as a drop in replacement for the stdlib errors package, providing a superset of the stlib package's functionality.

pkg/errors provides some functions that can annotate errors with stack information and messages at certain levels of the stack. New, Wrap and WithStack all annotate an error with stack information whilst Wrap also enables you to provide a message relevant to that level of the stack. WithStack and Wrap are smart enough, using the runtime package to examine an error and work out where it was generated even after that function has returned, which is useful if you have no control over the code that generates the error. Where you do it is best to annotate the error at generation to be sure that you don't forget to do it.

Here is an example which demonstrates annotating an error with stack information at generation and providing a contextual message at another point of the call stack. What's so great about pkg/errors is that it is instantly swappable with the stdlib package so you can enrich your errors with a one line import change!







Pretty cool, huh, happy wrapping!