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HTTP Support

  1. Retrying HTTP Failures
  2. Handling Retry-After
  3. Context Cancellation

Failsafe-go makes it easy to use any policies with HTTP. You can create a failsafe RoundTripper for a policy composition which can be used with an http.Client:

client := &http.Client{
  Transport: failsafehttp.NewRoundTripper(http.DefaultTransport, retryPolicy, circuitBreaker),
}

// Get with retries and circuit breaking
client.Get("http://failsafe-go.dev")

Alternatively, you can create a failsafe request for an http.Request, http.Client, and policies:

failsafeRequest := failsafehttp.NewRequest(request, client, retryPolicy)

// Perform request with retries
response, err := failsafeRequest.Do()

The difference between these two approaches is that a failsafe Request wraps a client whereas a failsafe RoundTripper is used internally by a client. This means any errors created by a client before using the RoundTripper would not be handled, but could be handled by a failsafe Request.

Retrying HTTP Failures

The failsafehttp package provides a RetryPolicyBuilder that can build retry policies with built-in detection of retryable HTTP errors and responses:

retryPolicy := failsafehttp.RetryPolicyBuilder().
  WithBackoff(time.Second, 30*time.Second).
  WithMaxRetries(3).
  Build()

failsafehttp.RetryPolicyBuilder will also delay retries according to any Retry-After header in the HTTP response. Additional configuration, including delays for other responses, can be added to the builder as needed.

Handling Retry-After

Other policies that support delays, such as circuit breakers can also be configured with a failsafehttp.DelayFunc that delays according to Retry-After headers:

circuitBreaker := circuitbreaker.Builder[*http.Response]().
  HandleIf(func(response *http.Response, err error) bool {
    return response != nil && response.StatusCode == 429
  }).
  WithDelayFunc(failsafehttp.DelayFunc).
  Build()

Context Cancellation

When using a failsafe RoundTripper or Request, Context cancellations are automatically propagated to the HTTP request context. When an execution is canceled for any reason, such as a Timeout, any outstanding HTTP request’s context is canceled. Similarly, when using a HedgePolicy, any outstanding hedge reqests contexts are canceled once the first successful response is received.