multierr

multierr is a package that allows combining multiple errors into a single error type. This allows functions to return multiple errors at once.

Callers can either use the returned multi-error as a conventional error (which is printed as a nice human-readable string), or continue working with it by appending or unwrapping individual errors.

Use cases

Validation

When validating configurations or user-input, it's always a great user-experience to see all problems at once. Just append all individual errors to a multi-error and return it to the user.

APIs

When implementing APIs (be it a WebServer's REST-API, a protobuf RPC API or any other interface), validating incoming data and returning all problems at once greatly improves a developer's quality of life.

No longer do API-users need to call an endpoint just to receive the next error they need to fix.

Collecting go-routine errors

Sometimes, multiple concurrently-running go-routines can each return an error. Which error should you report? The first one? What about the others, log them or ignore them? A multi-error can simply collect all those errors and return them at once.

Usage

Simple validation

type Input struct {
	Name string
	Age  int
}

func (i *Input) Validate() error {
	var valErr error

	if i.Name == "" {
		valErr = multierr.Append(valErr, errors.New("missing name"))
	}
	if i.Age < 18 {
		valErr = multierr.Append(valErr, errors.New("too young"))
	}
	return valErr
}

This prints the following output:

2 errors occurred:
  - missing name
  - too young

Custom title

If you instead return multierr.Titled(valErr, "Invalid input:"), you can get the following output:

Invalid input:
  - missing name
  - too young

Custom prefix

Alternatively, you can prefix each error via multierr.Prefixed(valErr, "Invalid input: ") to get the following output:

Invalid input: missing name
Invalid input: too young

Combining multiple multi-errors

When validating nested structures, you often receive errors from sub-validators. The same can happen when calling functions.

These cases can be handled in 4 different ways, all of them producing great error messages:

Option 1: multiErr.Append(valErr, err)

type Input struct {
	Name    string
	Age     int
	Address Address
}

type Address struct {
	City   string
	Street string
}

func (i *Input) Validate() error {
	var valErr error

	if i.Name == "" {
		valErr = multierr.Append(valErr, errors.New("missing name"))
	}
	if i.Age < 18 {
		valErr = multierr.Append(valErr, errors.New("too young"))
	}
	valErr = multierr.Append(valErr, i.Address.Validate())

	return multierr.Titled(valErr, "invalid input:")
}

func (a *Address) Validate() error {
	var valErr error

	if a.City == "" {
		valErr = multierr.Append(valErr, errors.New("missing city"))
	}
	if a.Street == "" {
		valErr = multierr.Append(valErr, errors.New("missing street"))
	}
	return valErr
}

This is the simplest version.
And you just got rid of those nasty if-error-checks.
You don't need to check for nil-errors when validating the address. If there is no error, Append() will simply do nothing.

You get the following error message:

invalid input:
  - missing name
  - too young
  - 2 errors occurred:
      - missing city
      - missing street

Option 2: multiErr.Append(valErr, multierr.Titled(...))

You can get a slightly better error message by choosing your own title.
Replace the address validation with this piece of code:

err := i.Address.Validate()
valErr = multierr.Append(valErr, multierr.Titled(err, "invalid address:"))

Again - you don't need to check for errors. The Titled-function simply returns nil if there was no error.
You get the following output:

invalid input:
  - missing name
  - too young
  - invalid address:
      - missing city
      - missing street

Option 3: multierr.Merge(valErr, err)

Now, what if you don't want nested error messages? Just merge them!
Replace the address validation with this:

valErr = multierr.Merge(valErr, i.Address.Validate())

You will get the following:

invalid input:
  - missing name
  - too young
  - missing city
  - missing street

Option 4: multierr.MergePrefixed(valErr, err)

In the above example, you do not see that city and street are subfields of the address. You can keep that information by using prefixes. Replace the address validation with this:

valErr = multierr.MergePrefixed(valErr, "invalid adress: ", i.Address.Validate())

You will get the following:

invalid input:
  - missing name
  - too young
  - invalid adress: missing city
  - invalid adress: missing street

Option 5: multiErr.Append(err, fmt.Errorf(...))

And, of course, calling fmt.Errorf() instead of multierr.Append() also yields great results.

Perform the address validation as follows:

if err := i.Address.Validate(); err != nil {
	valErr = multierr.Append(valErr, fmt.Errorf("invalid address: %s", err))
}

You will get:

invalid input:
  - missing name
  - too young
  - invalid address: 2 errors occurred:
      - missing city
      - missing street

Custom error format

Sometimes, you just want to format errors differently. And that's entirely possible:

err := multierr.Append(
	errors.New("error 1"),
	errors.New("error 2"),
)
err.Formatter = func(errs []error) string {
	return fmt.Sprintf("there are %d errors", len(errs))
}

This is not feasible if you want to have a different error format globally though.
In that case, you can overwrite the default formatter:

multierr.DefaultFormatter = func(errs []error) string {
	return fmt.Sprintf("there are %d errors", len(errs))
}

Accessing the list of errors

You can access a list with all sub-errors by simply calling

errList := multierr.Inspect(multiErr)

This also works if the provided argument is not actually a multi-error.
If it's a normal error, the returned list will have the error as a single element.

Unwrapping specific sub-errors

Multi-errors support the standard library's errors.Unwrap(), errors.As() and errors.Is() methods.
It's therefore possible to inspect certain root-causes of an error.