retry-go
A simple and flexible Go library for implementing retry mechanisms with configurable backoff strategies and error handling.
What is retry-go?
retry-go is a Go library that implements a retry mechanism for operations that may fail intermittently. It provides a simple API to automatically retry failed function calls with configurable attempts, delays, and backoff strategies, helping developers build more resilient applications.
Go developers building applications that interact with external services, networks, or other unreliable systems where transient failures are common.
Developers choose retry-go for its clean, intuitive API, performance optimizations like reusable retriers, and extensive customization options including multiple delay strategies and fine-grained error control, all while maintaining simplicity.
Overview
Simple golang library for retry mechanism
Use Cases
Best For
- Retrying HTTP requests to external APIs that may fail intermittently
- Handling transient database connection failures in Go applications
- Implementing exponential backoff with jitter for distributed systems
- Adding resiliency to file I/O operations in CLI tools
- Wrapping unreliable third-party library calls with retry logic
- Building robust microservices that need to handle network flakiness
Not Ideal For
- Projects where retry logic is trivial and a simple for-loop suffices, avoiding library overhead
- Applications requiring asynchronous or non-blocking retry patterns, as retry-go operates synchronously with blocking calls
- Teams heavily invested in the v4 API who find the v5 breaking changes too disruptive for migration
- Use cases needing highly specialized backoff algorithms not covered by built-in delay strategies, like Fibonacci or adaptive external metrics
Pros & Cons
Pros
The v5 redesign uses an intuitive retry.New().Do() syntax, simplifying integration as shown in HTTP examples, moving away from the older functional options pattern.
Creating retrier instances once minimizes allocations in success cases, optimizing high-frequency operations, as highlighted in the reusable retrier example.
Supports fixed, exponential backoff, random jitter, and custom DelayTypeFunc, enabling precise control over retry timing through functions like FullJitterBackoffDelay.
Features like Unrecoverable() and RetryIf() allow marking errors as non-retryable and filtering retry conditions, with detailed examples in the README.
Cons
Multiple major version updates (v5, v4, v3) with API redesigns, such as switching to method-based calls and changing error unwrapping, can break existing code and require migration efforts.
In v5, Unwrap() returns []error instead of a single error, complicating error inspection compared to standard Go practices and requiring adaptation with LastError() or errors.Is.
Creating custom DelayTypeFunc requires understanding the DelayContext interface, adding complexity for advanced use cases beyond the built-in strategies.
Frequently Asked Questions
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