How do you get a Golang program to print the line number of the error it just called?

Question

I was trying to throw errors in my Golang program with log.Fatal but, log.Fatal does not also print the line where the log.Fatal was r

Answer 1

Short version, there's nothing directly built in, however you can implement it with a minimal learning curve using runtime.Caller

func HandleError(err error) (b bool) {
    if err != nil {
        // notice that we're using 1, so it will actually log where
        // the error happened, 0 = this function, we don't want that.
        _, fn, line, _ := runtime.Caller(1)
        log.Printf("[error] %s:%d %v", fn, line, err)
        b = true
    }
    return
}

//this logs the function name as well.
func FancyHandleError(err error) (b bool) {
    if err != nil {
        // notice that we're using 1, so it will actually log the where
        // the error happened, 0 = this function, we don't want that.
        pc, fn, line, _ := runtime.Caller(1)

        log.Printf("[error] in %s[%s:%d] %v", runtime.FuncForPC(pc).Name(), fn, line, err)
        b = true
    }
    return
}

func main() {
    if FancyHandleError(fmt.Errorf("it's the end of the world")) {
        log.Print("stuff")
    }
}

playground

Answer 2

If you need exactly a stack trace, take a look at https://github.com/ztrue/tracerr

I created this package in order to have both stack trace and source fragments to be able to debug faster and log errors with much more details.

Here is a code example:

package main

import (
    "io/ioutil"
    "github.com/ztrue/tracerr"
)

func main() {
    if err := read(); err != nil {
        tracerr.PrintSourceColor(err)
    }
}

func read() error {
    return readNonExistent()
}

func readNonExistent() error {
    _, err := ioutil.ReadFile("/tmp/non_existent_file")
    // Add stack trace to existing error, no matter if it's nil.
    return tracerr.Wrap(err)
}

And here is the output:

Answer 3

You can set the Flags on either a custom Logger, or the default to include Llongfile or Lshortfile

// to change the flags on the default logger
log.SetFlags(log.LstdFlags | log.Lshortfile)