How can I combine Go middleware pattern with error returning request handlers?

Question

I am familiar with the Go middleware pattern like this:

// Pattern for writing HTTP middleware.
func middlewareHandler(next http.Handler) http.Handler {
             


        

Answer 1

The output of a middleware, by definition, is an HTTP response. If an error occurred, either it prevents the request from being fulfilled, in which case the middleware should return an HTTP error (500 if something unexpectedly went wrong on the server), or it does not, in which case whatever happened should be logged so that it can be fixed by a system administrator, and the execution should continue.

If you want to achieve this by allowing your functions to panic (although I would not recommend doing this intentionally), catching this situation and handling it later without crashing the server, there is an example in this blog post in section Panic Recovery (it even uses Alice).