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Error handling for humans

Project description

Introduction

What?

Tryme is a module that makes it easier to treat errors as values. Additionally, tryme helps you handle the absence of a value (None) in a more composable way.

The entire tryme library is contained in a single file tryme.py to make it as easy as possible to drop into an existing project.

Why?

Treating errors as values makes it easier to retain information related to errors and lets us defer error handling until the last possible moment. In contrast, exceptions are fundamentally lossy in they by convention contain tracebacks and error messages not values. Additionally, they require immediate handling.

Here are a few tasks where we might wish to defer error handling.

  • Processing multiple operations in batch where one or more operations may fail

  • Executing long running operations that require multiple retries

Treating failed operations as values rather than exceptions can simplify conditional logic and make programs more composable.

But c’mon that is unpythonic

A common convention for handling errors in Python is to raise exceptions. There is no reason however that this is always the best mechanism to handle errors, especially expected errors. The author of this package feels strongly that exceptions are best used to represent exceptional circumstances such as when undefined behavior is encountered.

Treating Errors as Values

Python does not have a built-in convention for treating errors as values other than try/except.

tryme introduces the Failure/Success convention of wrapping failed or successful results in a container class.

Here is how an error might be treated using good old try/except:

import requests


def google_is_accessible():
    response = requests.get('http://google.com')
    if response.ok:
        return response.ok
    else:
        raise RuntimeError("http request to google.com failed with status code %s" % response.status_code)

 try:
     is_accessible = google_is_accessible()
 except RuntimeError:
     is_accessible = False

Here is the same task using the tryme.Success and tryme.Failure:

import requests


def google_is_accessible():
    response = requests.get('http://google.com')
    if response.ok:
        return Success(response)
    else:
        return Failure(response)

 result = google_is_accessible()
 is_accessible = result.succeeded()
 # In the result value, we still have access to all of the information about the response

The utility method try_out executes a callable and wraps a raised exception in a Failure class. If an exception was not raised, a Success is returned

>>> from tryme import try_out
>>> result = try_out(lambda: 1 / 0)
>>> print result
Failure(ZeroDivisionError('integer division or modulo by zero',))
>>> exc = result.value
>>> exc
ZeroDivisionError('integer division or modulo by zero',)
>>> # the following would fail as it does not catch the correct exception, ZeroDivisionError
>>> # result = try_out(lambda: 1 / 0, exception=ValueError)
>>> result = try_out(lambda: 1 / 1)
>>> print result
Success(1)
>>> result.value
1

Retrying with Style

Let’s say we want to create a single server using a new Cloud computing provider named HighlyVariable Inc. HighlyVariable can provision our new server in a few seconds, several minutes, or occasionally not at all. This author has used cloud services where the “not at all” is not so uncommon an outcome!

Let’s create a server_ready function that returns a Success when the server is ready, a Failure when the operation times out. A “terminal” state such as “Ready” or “Failed” will terminate retries immediately whereas a Failed will continue execution of the server_ready function until 300 seconds after the function was first called.

If our new server is not ready after 300 seconds, server_ready will return an instance of Failure.

from highlyvariable import create_instance, get_instance_status
from tryme import retry_decorator

def make_server(name):
    create_instance(name)


@retry
def wait_for_server_statuses(name, statuses):
    status = get_instance_status(name)
    if status in statuses:
        return Success(status)
    else:
        return Failure("Not ready yet")


def server_ready(name):
    # the decorated function will return two values, a log accounting for the time spent retrying
    # and the actual result
    log, result = wait_for_server_statuses(name, ['Ready', 'Failed'])
    # a failure here only indicates a timeout
    if result.failed():
        return Failure("Server %s not ready after %d seconds" % (name, log.elapsed))

    # unwrap the value
    status = result.get()
    if status == 'Ready':
        return Success('server %s is ready after %d seconds and %d attempts!"
                       % (name, log.elapsed, log.count))
    else:
        return Failure('server %s failed after %d seconds!"
                       % (name, log.elapsed))

make_server('jenkins')
result = server_ready('jenkins')
assert result.succeeded()
# prints "Server jenkins is ready after n seconds and n attempts!"
result.to_console()

There something a little weird about the above example. Why did we return Success when the status was “Failed”? This is because the return value of Failure in the wrapped function is a signal to the @retry decorator to continue retrying until the timeout is reached or an exception is raised.

Requirements

  • CPython >= 2.7

Background

This package is inspired by Philip Xu’s excellent monad package. It also takes some inspiration from the excellent vavr library for java and the Scala language. See this excellent tutorial on the Try utility in Scala.

Pssssh! While this package uses gasp monads as the core abstraction it does not provide general purpose implementations of monad, applicatives, and functors. Further it does not attempt to overload common Python operators to support function composition.

Installation

Install from PyPI:

pip install smonad

Install from source, download source package, decompress, then cd into source directory, run:

make install

License

BSD New, see LICENSE for details.

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