Error Codes Utility Tool 🛠

[DelusionalOptimist]

@michael has made an awesome tool to help improve troubleshooting of errors around various Layer5 Go projects.
Whenever the tool is run on a project, it analyzes the error codes in the source code, verifies them and updates or suggests changes to them so that they abide by certain best practices. It also imports the error codes so that they can be used to improve documentation.

The conventions that this utility proposes have to be enforced upon various projects and help is needed with that. To dig deeper into the subject:

• A good description about what the tool does and places you can offer help at in [Errors] [WIP] Error codes CLI utility tool by mgfeller · Pull Request #48 · layer5io/meshkit · GitHub
• Also, a great demo given by Michael, taking us through all the aspects on how contributors may use this in Layer5 Community Meeting (June 4th, 2021)

Do go through this stuff and interact with the community.

[Lee]

Great highlight. This error code utility auto-generates codes and their documentation (see Error Codes Reference). It’s slick.

[michael]

The doc command of errorutil prints out some documentation, and is hopefully up to date.
Improvements are of course welcome (go run github.com/layer5io/meshkit/cmd/errorutil doc)

For the utility to work, a few conventions have to be followed: the names of the error code variables have to match this regex: Err[A-Z].+Code. They have to be declared in files called error.go.

When instantiating errors using errors.New(...) the error code variable has to be used, using a literal code as first parameter will not be handled by the utility.

Here’s an example: meshkit/error.go at master · layer5io/meshkit · GitHub