Reattempt

Simple Enumerable APIs offering retries with exponential backoff and jitter.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'reattempt'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install reattempt

Simplest use with the defaults - 5 attempts, 0.02 to 1 second delay, 0.2 jitter (delay is randomised ±10%), catching StandardError:

begin
  Reattempt::Retry.new.each do
    poke_remote_api
  end
rescue Reattempt::RetriesExceeded => e
  handle_repeated_failure(e.cause)
end

Instances are thread-safe, and it's suggested that you separate their creation from usage: inject them as dependencies, configure them in class attributes, store them in constants, etc.

Reattempt consists of two main classes:

Backoff implements a simple jittered exponential backoff calculator as an Enumerable:

# Start delay 0.075-0.125 seconds, increasing to 0.75-1.25 seconds
bo = Reattempt::Backoff.new(min_delay: 0.1, max_delay: 1.0, jitter: 0.5)

bo.take(4).map { |x| x.round(4) } # => [0.1138, 0.2029, 0.4227, 0.646]
bo.take(2).each { |delay| sleep delay }
bo.delay_for_attempt(4) # => 1.0403524624141058
bo[4] # => 0.8328055668923606

bo.each do |delay|
  printf("Sleeping for about %.2f seconds\n", delay)
  sleep delay
end

Note Backoff is strictly a calculator, it does not implement sleep itself.

The iterator is unbounded and you're expected to take however many you need, or manually exit the loop.

Retry implements a retrying iterator, catching the given Exception types and sleeping as per a configured Backoff instance.

bo = Reattempt::Backoff.new(min_delay: 0.1, max_delay: 1.0, jitter: 0.5)
try = Reattempt::Retry.new(tries: 5, rescue: TempError, backoff: bo)
begin
  try.each do |attempt|
    raise TempError, "Failed in attempt #{attempt}"
  end
rescue Reattempt::RetriesExceeded => e
  p e.cause # => #<TempError: "Failed in attempt 5">
end

rescue is coerced to an array, and its contents are simply expected to respond to ===, so you can do complex matching like this:

exception_matcher = ->(ex) do
  ex.is_a?(IOError) && ex.message.includes?('closed stream')
end

try = Reattempt::Retry.new(rescue: [exception_matcher, SomeOtherException])

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/Freaky/ruby-reattempt.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.