Package yikes provides functionality for reporting errors to operators.
It is based on the design explored in this post, specifically the error reporting for operators bit. The idea is that operators want errors reported wherever they occur in the call stack, not from some middleware that requires the error to be aware of its own stack trace and any context surrounding the error than operator may be interested in.
It provides a Reporter type that can be used to report errors. It uses the log/slog.Logger type to report errors, but the reporting doesn't have to be to a log line; the Logger could be configured, for example, to report to an error reporting service.
The error return from the Reporter.Report method (and its aliases, Reporter.Error, Reporter.Warn, and Reporter.Critical) is the same error but wrapped in a type that indicates to yikes that the error has already been reported and should not be reported again, unless it's being reported at a higher level. This is done so callers of helper functions within your application don't need to worry about whether the helper reported the error or not; they can just call Reporter.Report and have it do the deduplication itself. It will be rereported at a higher level so any automation that triggers at higher levels will still trigger, even if a function deeper in the call stack didn't have the context to understand the error should be reported at a higher level. If the application, for some reason, needs to know whether an error was reported or not, AlreadyReported can provide that information.
The intended use of this package is, whenever encountering an error an operator would be interested in, to replace this:
if err != nil {
return err
}with this:
if err != nil {
return yikes.From(ctx).Error(ctx, "some error occurred", err)
}optionally passing any context the operator would be interested in as arguments to Reporter.Error.