Goof

Goof is a drop-in replacement for the go stdlib errors package, providing enhanced error construction capabilities and formatting capabilities.

Plays Golf

Errors can be created with the standard New or Newf constructors in order to create new error instances. However, the methods WithField, WithFields, WithFieldE, and WithFieldsE also exist. These methods enable the construction of new error instances with additional information about the error injected at the time and location of when the error was created.

These fields then become available to the Golf framework in order to extract more information about an error than just a simple error message.

Structured Logging

The support for fields as a backing-store in conjunction with Golf support enable the ability to seamlessly integrate with the structured logging framework Logrus.

The advantage of this marriage between error objects and a structured logging framework is that information about an error is stored with an error, at the time of the error's construction. This alleviates the question of whether or not to log an error and the contextual information surrounding it when an error is created.

Logging Errors sans Goof

The file ex1-nogoof.go in the examples/example1-nogoof folder demonstrates how traditional error handling and logging looks without Goof:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "os"

    log "github.com/Sirupsen/logrus"
)

func getDividend() int {
    return 2
}

func getDivisor() int {
    return 0
}

func divide() (int, error) {
    x := getDividend()
    y := getDivisor()

    if y == 0 {
        log.Errorf("error dividing by 0 with %d / %d", x, y)
        return -1, fmt.Errorf("error dividing by 0 with %d / %d", x, y)
    }

    return x / y, nil
}

func calculate(op string) error {
    switch op {
    case "divide":
        z, err := divide()
        if err != nil {
            log.Errorf("division error %v", err)
            return fmt.Errorf("division error %v", err)
        }
        fmt.Printf("division = %d\n", z)
        return nil
    }
    return nil
}

func main() {
    if err := calculate("divide"); err != nil {
        log.Errorf("calculation error %v", err)
        os.Exit(1)
    }
}

Running the above example results in the above output:

$ go run examples/example1-nogoof/ex1-nogoof.go
ERRO[0000] error dividing by 0 with 2 / 0               
ERRO[0000] division error error dividing by 0 with 2 / 0
ERRO[0000] calculation error division error error dividing by 0 with 2 / 0
exit status 1

In the example above the main function asks calculate to do division, and so calculate forwards that request to divide. The divide function then fetches the dividend and the divisor from some data store via the (undefined) methods getDividend and getDivisor and proceeds to perform the operation.

However, if the divisor is zero then a divide-by-zero is logged and an error is returned to calculate which in turn logs and returns the error to main which also logs the error.

The problem is neither the divide or calculate functions should really be logging anything regarding errors. Error logging should be as centralized as possible in order to avoid cluttering logs with duplicate information. This often means logging errors at the outer-most areas of a program.

Yet this choice also means you can, and often do, lose contextual information about the errors. In this case neither calculate or main know what the dividend or divisor were. True, the error object can format a string that includes that information, but the logging framework Logrus articulates a very intelligent case for structured logging.

Logging Errors with Goof

Goof on the other hand makes creating errors that can be logged by a structured logger as simple as can be. Let's revisit the previous example using the file ex2-goof.go in the examples/example2-goof folder:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "os"

    log "github.com/Sirupsen/logrus"
    "github.com/akutz/goof"
)

func divide() int, error {
    x := getDividend()
    y := getDivisor()
    if y == 0 {
        return -1, goof.WithFields(goof.Fields{
            "dividend": x,
            "divisor": y,
            }, "divide by zero")
    }

    return x / y
}

func calculate(op string) error {
    switch op {
        case "divide":
            if z, err := divide(); err != nil {
                return err
            } else {
                fmt.Printf("division = %d\n", z)
                return nil
            }
    }
}

func main() {
    if err := calculate("divide"); err != nil {
        log.Error(err)
        os.Exit(1)
    }
}

In the refactored example no errors are logged in the divide or calculate functions. Instead, an error is created with fields labeled as "divisor" and "dividend" with those fields set to the values to which they relate. The error is also created with a brief, but sufficient, message, describing the issue.

This error is then returned all the way to the main function where it is logged via the structured logging framework Logrus. Because the main function also instructs Logrus to use the Golf formatter for logging, this is what is emitted to the console:

$ go run examples/example2-goof/ex2-goof.go
ERRO[0000] divide by zero                               dividend=2 divisor=0
exit status 1

The log output is now much cleaner, concise, and without losing any information regarding the context of the error and that may be helpful to debugging.