Ratpacked: Handling Exceptions When Reading Configuration Sources

To define configuration sources for our Ratpack application we have several options. We can set default properties, look at environment variables or Java system properties, load JSON or YAML formatted configuration files, or implement our own configuration source. When something goes wrong using one of these methods we want to be able to handle that situation. For example if an optional configuration file is not found, we want to inform the user, but the application must still start. The default exception handling will throw the exception and the application is stopped. We want to customise this so we have more flexibility on how to handle exceptions.

We provide the configuration source in the serverConfig configuration block of our Ratpack application. We must add the onError method and provide an error handler implementation before we load any configuration source. This error handler will be passed to each configuration source and is executed when an exception occurs when the configuration source is invoked. The error handler implements the Action interface with the type Throwable. In our implementation we can, for example, check for the type of Throwable and show a correct status message to the user.

In the following example application, we rely on external configuration source files that are optional. If the file is present it must be loaded, otherwise a message must be shown to indicate the file is missing, but the application still starts:

// File: src/ratpack/ratpack.groovy
import org.slf4j.Logger
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory

import java.nio.file.NoSuchFileException
import java.nio.file.Paths

import static ratpack.groovy.Groovy.ratpack

final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger('ratpack.server')

ratpack {
    serverConfig {
        // Use custom error handler, when
        // exceptions happen during loading
        // of configuration sources.
        onError { throwable ->
            if (throwable in NoSuchFileException) {
                final String file = throwable.file
                log.info "Cannot load optional configuration file '{}'", file
            } else {
                throw throwable
            }
        }

        yaml('application.yml')

        // Optional configuration files
        // to override values in 
        // 'application.yml'. This could
        // potentially give an exception if
        // the files don't exist.
        yaml(Paths.get('conf/application.yml'))
        json(Paths.get('conf/application.json'))

        args(args)
        sysProps()
        env()

        ...
    }

    ...
}

Next we start the application with the absence of the optional configuration files conf/application.yml and conf/application.json:

$ gradle run
...
:run

12:28:38.887 [main]            INFO  ratpack.server.RatpackServer - Starting server...
12:28:39.871 [main]            INFO  ratpack.server - Cannot load optional configuration file 'conf/application.yml'
12:28:39.873 [main]            INFO  ratpack.server - Cannot load optional configuration file 'conf/application.json'
12:28:40.006 [main]            INFO  ratpack.server.RatpackServer - Building registry...
12:28:40.494 [main]            INFO  ratpack.server.RatpackServer - Ratpack started (development) for http://localhost:5050

Notice that the application is started and in the logging we have nice status messages that tell us the files are not found.

Written with Ratpack 1.3.3.