Module anyhow

Flexible error handling.

• Crate ::anyhow.
• docs.rs
• crates.io
• GitHub

anyhow provides Error, a trait object based error type for use cases where you want error handling to be easy.

It is often said that Rust libraries should define specific error types that implement std::error::Error, so their callers can respond to errors precisely; but applications can often just propagate errors up the call stack without caring about specific error types.

For these more casual error handling use cases, it is sometimes idiomatic in low-dependency Rust code to return Box<dyn std::error::Error> as a generic error type. anyhow provides a similar generic error but with more features: anyhow::Error requires no allocation in the success case, supports downcasting to the original error type, and can carry a backtrace, among others.

The Result<T> type alias saves typing, and the Context trait provides the .context() method for adding contextual information to errors as they propagate, the anyhow! and bail! macros

For defining precise errors, use thiserror instead of anyhow.

Examples

Use Result<T> as your main error type, and .context() to add helpful error messages:

use anyhow::{anyhow, bail, Context, Result};

fn load_config() -> Result<Config> {
    let content = read_config_file()
        .context("Unable to load config file")?;

    let config = parse_config(&content)
        .context("Invalid configuration format")?;

    Ok(config)
}

struct Config {
    name: String,
}

fn read_config_file() -> Result<String> {
    Ok(std::fs::read_to_string("config.toml")?)
}

fn parse_config(content: &str) -> Result<Config> {
   Ok(Config { name: content.to_string() })
}