Timeout Errors

Catch all of them Net::HTTP timeout errors. Why? Because there are lots of them.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'timeout_errors'

Let's playing a game. You do a request. It times out. You try to guess which error it timed out with. Here's how you win every time.

require 'uri'
require 'timeout_errors'

begin
  uri = URI.parse("http://imsuresomeonewillregisterthatjusttotroll.me/")
  Net::HTTP.get_response(uri)
rescue TimeoutErrors => e
  puts "And the winner is: #{e.inspect}"
end

Now, imagine your favourite 3rd party HTTP client library, that uses net/http under the hook invents yet another one of those pesky timeout errors. If you play the game with that specific 3rd party library, you are quite likely to loose. Here's how you can improve your chances:

require 'best_http_client_ever_because_we_need_yet_another_one'
require 'timeout_errors'

TimeoutErrors.include_error(
  BestHttpClientEverBecauseWeNeedYetAnotherOne::YetAnotherTimeoutToSolveItAllError
)

begin
  BestHttpClientEverBecauseWeNeedYetAnotherOne.get(
    "http://imsuresomeonewillregisterthatjusttotroll.me/"
  )
rescue TimeoutErrors => e
  puts "Your favourite timeout error is: #{e.inspect}"
end

Quite useful, heh?

Here's the list of errors caught by TimeoutErrors by default.

• EOFError
• Errno::ECONNREFUSED
• Errno::ECONNRESET
• Errno::EHOSTUNREACH
• Errno::EINVAL
• Errno::ENETUNREACH
• Errno::EPIPE
• Errno::ETIMEDOUT
• Net::HTTPBadResponse
• Net::HTTPHeaderSyntaxError
• Net::ProtocolError
• SocketError
• Timeout::Error

Note that you can fill this list during runtime with TimeoutErrors.include_error.

There is a lot of previous art on this topic. Why create another one?

This library is a great choice. It uses standard Ruby interface and clearly lists all the errors. However, I wanna catch them all with a single rescue ErrorMatcher clause. Which leads us to net_http_exception_fix.

net_http_exception_fix is a hotfix to give those common exceptions that pop up from Net:HTTP usage a shared parent exception class. This is the interface I like, however it is achieved through polluting builtin' errors ancestor chain.

Instead of introducing extra interface, or monkey patching existing errors, this library exploits a fun little fact about Ruby's exception handling. Errors listed on the rescue clause are matched with the case (===) operator.

Thanks to the authors and contributors of net_http_timeout_errors and net_http_exception_fix.