When you start learning Elixir, the first you’ll learn is the culture of let it crash . Which sounds great! It measn that you don’t need to handle exceptions and the system heal itself , it’s to easy to fall in to trap of not catching any exception like I did.

After your application is ready to go live, you’ll understand that not every thing should crash. Consider this example from Elide project and the changes I’ve made to handle exceptions.

Elide project is a url shortener service, that I’m using to experiment with Elixir and Phoenix. I’m using hashids to generate the short urls and later when people use short urls I use the same library to decode a short url to meaning full data that I have in the app, all simple simple stuff. However while I was developing, I followed my own understanding of let it crash which was to never handle any unexpected behaviour.

Consider simplified version of getting a short url entity:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 defmodule Elide . ElinkServer alias Elide . { Repo , Elink } def get_elink ( slug ) do slug |> by_slug |> Repo . one end defp by_slug ( my_slug ) do elink_seq = get_details_by_slug ( my_slug ) from e in Elink , where: e . elink_seq == ^ elink_seq end defp get_details_by_slug ( my_slug ) do s = Hashids . new ( min_len: 1 , salt: salt ) { :ok , [ elink_seq ]} = Hashids . decode ( s , my_slug ) elink_seq end end

The code looks simple and I thought if someone wants to open an invalid short url, well I let it crash !

As soon as I had the project on the production server I noticed that:

If any users enters an invalid short url, they’ll face an ugly page with error Server internal error

I am getting a lot of false alarms on honeybadger from bots on the internet, they don’t care that I don’t handle corner cases, they just hit the web server with invalid urls

To be honest I knew I should handle this case and I postponed it.

So what are the options? How can I handle it in elixir in a decent way

Returning nil on case of failure. Nah, I certainly don’t like this one. How can I know what was the error in the first place if I only return nil.

Using try/catch , yeah it does the job but doesn’t look decent. Generally I don’t like the codes that are guarded with exceptions. If I don’t have any option, sure but there should be a better way in Elixir and Erlang.

, yeah it does the job but doesn’t look decent. Generally I don’t like the codes that are guarded with exceptions. If I don’t have any option, sure but there should be a better way in Elixir and Erlang. Returning a tuple of {:ok, result} in case of success and {:error, reason} in case of failure. I’ve seen this one I was using File module. Looks like that is convention that people are following in Erlang and Elixir.

The idea behind using using tuple as opposed to using try/catch is we shouldn’t use errors as control flow (read more). If a short url doesn’t exist in database because a bot requested a random url should be considered as an invalid data and treated as invalid data. Let’s how can we refactor this code to handle invalid data in Elixir way:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 defmodule Elide . ElinkServer alias Elide . { Repo , Elink } def get_elink ( slug ) do slug |> by_slug |> fetch_one end defp fetch_one ({ :error , _ } = error ), do : error defp fetch_one ({ :ok , query }) = { :ok , Repo . one ( query )} defp by_slug ( my_slug ) do case get_details_by_slug ( my_slug ) do { :error , _ } = error -> error { :ok , elink_seq } -> { :ok , from e in Elink , where: e . elink_seq == ^ elink_seq } end defp get_details_by_slug ( my_slug ) do s = Hashids . new ( min_len: 1 , salt: salt ) case Hashids . decode ( s , my_slug ) do { :ok , [ elink_seq ]} -> { :ok , elink_seq } _ -> { :error , :failed_to_decode } end end end

Does it worth it? I believe so with this approach I can simply pattern match the return value and keep the flow going. For example my controller would look like:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 def go ( conn , % { "slug" => slug }) do slug |> ElinkServer . get_elink |> redirect_to_url ( conn ) end defp redirect_to_url ({ :error , _ }, conn ) do conn |> put_status ( 404 ) |> render ( Elide . ErrorView , "404.html" ) |> halt end defp redirect_to_url ({ :ok , elink }, conn ) do conn |> inc_stat ( elink ) |> redirect ( external: elink . url ) |> halt end