Errors

$ npm install feathers-errors --save

The feathers-errors module contains a set of standard error classes used by all other Feathers modules as well as an Express error handler to format those - and other - errors and setting the correct HTTP status codes for REST calls.

Feathers errors

The following error types, all of which are instances of FeathersError are available:

ProTip: All of the Feathers plugins will automatically emit the appropriate Feathers errors for you. For example, most of the database adapters will already send Conflict or Unprocessable errors with the validation errors from the ORM.

• BadRequest: 400
• NotAuthenticated: 401
• PaymentError: 402
• Forbidden: 403
• NotFound: 404
• MethodNotAllowed: 405
• NotAcceptable: 406
• Timeout: 408
• Conflict: 409
• Unprocessable: 422
• GeneralError: 500
• NotImplemented: 501
• Unavailable: 503

Feathers errors are pretty flexible. They contain the following fields:

• type - FeathersError
• name - The error name (ie. "BadRequest", "ValidationError", etc.)
• message - The error message string
• code - The HTTP status code
• className - A CSS class name that can be handy for styling errors based on the error type. (ie. "bad-request" , etc.)
• data - An object containing anything you passed to a Feathers error except for the errors object.
• errors - An object containing whatever was passed to a Feathers error inside errors. This is typically validation errors or if you want to group multiple errors together.

ProTip: To convert a Feathers error back to an object call error.toJSON(). A normal console.log of a JavaScript Error object will not automatically show those additional properties described above (even though they can be accessed directly).

Here are a few ways that you can use them:

const errors = require('feathers-errors');

// If you were to create an error yourself.
const notFound = new errors.NotFound('User does not exist');

// You can wrap existing errors
const existing = new errors.GeneralError(new Error('I exist'));

// You can also pass additional data
const data = new errors.BadRequest('Invalid email', {
  email: '[email protected]'
});

// You can also pass additional data without a message
const dataWithoutMessage = new errors.BadRequest({
  email: '[email protected]'
});

// If you need to pass multiple errors
const validationErrors = new errors.BadRequest('Invalid Parameters', {
  errors: { email: 'Email already taken' }
});

// You can also omit the error message and we'll put in a default one for you
const validationErrors = new errors.BadRequest({
  errors: {
    email: 'Invalid Email'
  }
});

Server Side Errors

Promises swallow errors if you forget to add a catch() statement. Therefore, you should make sure that you always call .catch() on your promises. To catch uncaught errors at a global level you can add the code below to your top-most file.

process.on('unhandledRejection', (reason, p) => {
  console.log('Unhandled Rejection at: Promise ', p, ' reason: ', reason);
});

REST (Express) errors

The separate feathers-errors/handler module is an Express error handler middleware that formats any error response to a REST call as JSON (or HTML if e.g. someone hits our API directly in the browser) and sets the appropriate error code.

ProTip: Because Feathers extends Express you can use any Express compatible error middleware with Feathers. In fact, the error handler bundled with feathers-errors is just a slightly customized one.

Very Important: Just as in Express, the error handler has to be registered after all middleware and services.

app.use(handler())

Set up the error handler with the default configuration.

const errorHandler = require('feathers-errors/handler');
const app = feathers();

// before starting the app
app.use(errorHandler())

app.use(handler(options))

const error = require('feathers-errors/handler');
const app = feathers();

// Just like Express your error middleware needs to be
// set up last in your middleware chain.
app.use(error({
    html: function(error, req, res, next) {
      // render your error view with the error object
      res.render('error', error);
    }
}))

ProTip: If you want to have the response in json format be sure to set the Accept header in your request to application/json otherwise the default error handler will return HTML.

The following options can be passed when creating a new error handler:

• html (Function|Object) [optional] - A custom formatter function or an object that contains the path to your custom html error pages.

ProTip: html can also be set to false to disable html error pages altogether so that only JSON is returned.