Capturing panic() in golang

Question

We have a large-ish golang application that uses the logger (actually, a custom logger), to write output to a log file that is periodically rotated.

However, when an

Answer 1

As far as I know, you can't redirect the output from panic away from standard error, or to your logger. The best thing you can do is redirect standard error to a file which you can do externally, or inside your program.

For my rclone program I redirected standard error to capture everything to a file on an option which is unfortunately isn't particularly easy to do in a cross platform way. Here is how I did it (see the redirect*.go files)

For linux/unix

// Log the panic under unix to the log file

//+build unix

package main

import (
    "log"
    "os"
    "syscall"
)

// redirectStderr to the file passed in
func redirectStderr(f *os.File) {
    err := syscall.Dup2(int(f.Fd()), int(os.Stderr.Fd()))
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatalf("Failed to redirect stderr to file: %v", err)
    }
}

and for windows

// Log the panic under windows to the log file
//
// Code from minix, via
//
// http://play.golang.org/p/kLtct7lSUg

//+build windows

package main

import (
    "log"
    "os"
    "syscall"
)

var (
    kernel32         = syscall.MustLoadDLL("kernel32.dll")
    procSetStdHandle = kernel32.MustFindProc("SetStdHandle")
)

func setStdHandle(stdhandle int32, handle syscall.Handle) error {
    r0, _, e1 := syscall.Syscall(procSetStdHandle.Addr(), 2, uintptr(stdhandle), uintptr(handle), 0)
    if r0 == 0 {
        if e1 != 0 {
            return error(e1)
        }
        return syscall.EINVAL
    }
    return nil
}

// redirectStderr to the file passed in
func redirectStderr(f *os.File) {
    err := setStdHandle(syscall.STD_ERROR_HANDLE, syscall.Handle(f.Fd()))
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatalf("Failed to redirect stderr to file: %v", err)
    }
    // SetStdHandle does not affect prior references to stderr
    os.Stderr = f
}